Quick Ways to Improve Your SEO

Intro

Improving SEO is often a long-term process, but if you’re trying to boost your site’s ranking quickly, there are a few strategies that you can employ to make it to the top of a results page. Over the course of this guide, we’re going to address some tried and tested methods for improving your SEO value in a rush.

Focus on Your Content

While it may not seem like producing content is as quick of a method of improving SEO as you think, when you compare it to the glacial speed of many other strategies, it’s actually pretty quick. As long as you’re willing to pay for it, content can dramatically improve the SEO value of your site.

There are plenty of different types of content that you can put on your site, and the ideal form of content will depend on your niche. If you’re working in a niche where there’s plenty of technical information, then you’ll probably want to produce written content that your visitors can browse through at length.

On the other hand, you’ll also want to make sure that you can retain the attention of your visitors, and long-form written content is rarely ever good for that. In that case, you’re better off producing content like videos, though you’ll have to keep those short and to the point, with high production values.

If you have to produce lengthy content, creating a podcast is a great way to get your visitors’ attention over a longer period of time without boring them. This is because podcasts are able to easily maintain someone’s attention without making it impossible for them to do other things, like driving to work.

However, remember that the type of content you produce is secondary to the fact that you are producing content in the first place. The amount of relevant content on your site will dramatically affect your SEO rating, and if done right, it can help boost your site’s rankings considerably.

Update Your Site Regularly While this may seem like it goes hand in hand with producing good content, you’d be surprised by the number of people who seem to think that SEO is a set it and forget it task. While producing a bunch of quality content will ensure that your website gets a ranking boost, it doesn’t guarantee that the rankings will stay that way.

If you want to be able to stay at the top of the results page, be sure to constantly update your information, especially if your business operates in a niche where things change pretty frequently. If there’s one thing that Google hates, it’s outdated information, and if the info on your site is no longer relevant, your rankings will plummet.

Check Your Site’s Servers

Another thing that you’ll want to do is ensure that your site is loading as quickly as possible because that will improve your visitor retention. If your site takes longer than six seconds to load, then every additional second after that will exponentially increase the chance of someone leaving for another site.

You may be wondering what this has to do with SEO, and a lot of people don’t realize that SEO is a two-way street where your website’s popularity will also affect your rankings. Google can see whether or not people are staying on your site, and that will affect your SEO ranking accordingly.

To ensure that your users are getting the best possible page loading times, you’ll have to make sure that you’re using the right host and that people can connect to your site as easily as possible. There are many free tools that you can use to check how quickly your site’s pages load, and some might even allow you to check page loading times from a range of geographical areas.

Loading Times and Site Images

Along with ensuring that your site is hosted on the proper servers, there are plenty of things that you can do to optimize your site without even changing the host. For example, you’ll want to check the images on your site to ensure that they’re not slowing everything down for your visitors.

Certain image formats may end up slowing down your site’s loading time since they will be far larger files despite a relatively minimal increase in quality. This is why many sites stick to .jpeg and .png images, since they load relatively quickly with a minimal loss in quality.

Outbound Links are Essential

Unfortunately, it doesn’t suffice to post your content without a second thought, since there are many things that you can add to your site’s pages to ensure that your SEO value is as high as possible. This includes adding outbound links to your content that lead to other sites.

Of course, you’ll have to be careful where you put your outbound links, and you won’t want to stuff your pages with them because Google’s algorithm is smarter than that. If Google notices that you’ve been stuffing your pages with irrelevant links for a better SEO rating, then the opposite will happen and your SEO will tank.

You’ll also want to ensure that your links are relevant and that they lead to authoritative sources instead of sites that have very little credibility. You can also add internal links to your content to improve your site’s SEO, and this is one of the quickest ways to boost your SEO rating if you already have a bunch of related pages.

Do Regular Maintenance

We’ve already mentioned how Google bases your SEO rating on how functional your site is, so be sure to go through your site and ensure that nothing is broken. You may be surprised by the number of things that can break, reducing your SEO rating in the process.

For example, links can break all the time, especially since they’re dependent on third-party sites that you may not have any control over. Be sure to go through these with a fine-toothed comb to ensure that they’re not dramatically affecting your SEO.