5 Best SEO Tips That Will Drive More Traffic

Chris Wagner

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Are you tired of reading the same ineffective SEO techniques?

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Finally: SEO that works!

5 SEO Tips That Can Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Well, if you are a website owner or a digital marketer or an SEO professional, the very first question you ask every morning is “What is my website ranking on Google?”

Checking the Alexa Rank of your website is your daily morning cup of tea!

Ranking depends on many factors like your content, images, page loading speed, and in order to optimize them, you need to use SEO tools available in the market.

We need to understand ‘Google’s strategy’ to optimize our pages. 

This is so because of the fact that Google constantly changes its algorithms for better user experience.

Without much ado, here are 5 SEO tips that can drive more traffic to your website.

Are you ready for SEO that works? Let’s take a deep dive.

1)  Keep search intent in mind while developing the content.

2) Improve page speed with lazy load.

3) Use free images or give proper credit if you have copied it. 

4)  In-bound and External links.

5) Use analytical tools to keep track of your performance.

Well, I know you must have read somewhere about these tips earlier too! So before you skip the article, let me tell you that here we are going to discuss ‘WHY’ for each step.

It is always easy to accomplish a goal if you have an end result in mind, isn’t it?

SEO That Works

Keep search intent in mind while developing the content.

Well, after doing the keyword research but before you put in hours of effort in drafting a masterpiece, pay attention to the search intent. 

Do you know why it is difficult to rank on the number one position in Google?

That is because we are writing the contents meant for humans whereas the listing of the same will be done by bots. 

Sorry! We can’t do much about it unless you belong to a category like a seller in this story.

Just like us, Google too is facing the competition in its own niche and there are other search engines too. Although Google is the top leader in this field, competition needs to be taken seriously.

If you are still reading this post, that clearly means you need an answer to the question “Why is search intent is important?”

When I analyzed this thing a little further, I found that when you talk with someone or sell something face to face, the person in front of you knows your intentions.

Whereas if you are having a website, visitors can visit it with many intentions in mind which we might not be aware of.

For example, if I just type the word “pizza” it would display results like the one below.

Please bear with me for a long image and allow me to tempt you to eat pizza, blame those extra calories on me! 😉

If you pay close attention you will come to know the fact that it displays the sites for:

• Purchasing pizza by ordering online – transactional
• Making a pizza – a recipe 
• Restaurants to enjoy pizza- the places, navigational
• Information regarding the movie “Pizza” on Netflix – informational

So when you choose a keyword, it is essential to be very particular about its use. 

Some words that you might search may have multiple meanings and are known as polysemous words.

For eg, the word ‘Hummingbird’ refers to an algorithm of Google and also to the real bird.

It is better not to target polysemous words.

How would Google know what a particular reader wants to know? 

Through algorithms, Google pays attention to the intent of the search query rather than that language.

It is therefore important to add LSI keywords and always write the content keeping the user in view.

Here are some keyword “modifiers” that typically indicate a certain type of search intent:

Source: Ahrefs

You need to be very clear while projecting your site whether it is just for:

• information and knowledge addition, 
• To persuade the user to buy-transactional
• To guide user for easy navigation-navigational
• Any other, for example, a recipe

 Depending on the above, you may decide to write:

• A blog post
• Product page
• E-Commerce Category pages like eBay or Amazon

Guys, to be on the safe side do not choose keywords with mixed intent. They can drastically bring down your traffic at any moment.

Google won’t show your site if it fails to match the search intent.

Remember user satisfaction is the top priority for Google.

Well, worried about how to draft your content? Think like Google, you will get the answers.

The next time you search for anything, do try to analyze what was your intent behind the search.

Improve page speed with lazy load

One of the crucial factors, rather the most crucial factor in SEO is making the web site load faster.

If you type any search query in Google, you will observe that it not only displays us the result but it also states the number of files it scanned and the time limit required.

Did you see?

When I searched for the result “pancakes” it showed me 66,00,00,000 results in 1.13 seconds.

What does it mean if a search engine like Google is giving importance to loading the data?

Now we might think that “time” is not the factor which we can control.

The way our site loads on the internet depends on various factors and internet speed is one of them.

Agreed! But these days network is not the issue. So if our page is not loading fast, we need to optimize it.

But how do we test the speed with which the web page loads? 

Well, there are plenty of tools like GTMetrix and others which you can use to test your site.

Any SEO professional familiar with SEO that works will already have optimized the images for the site but yet the site loads slowly.

What can be the possible reason for this?

This is because all data and images are loaded at one point in time.

Rather than that if images and videos are allowed to load as and when the user scrolls down that page then the site speed can increase.

In technical terms, this slow loading of images as and when the user scrolls that page is called “lazy loading.”

If you wish, you can download an “advanced lazy loading plugin” for your WordPress site. 

Data reveals that your data should ideally load in 2 seconds or less; if it takes a little more, the user might hit the back button.

By using lazy loading effects you can reduce:

• Initial page weight
• Initial page load time
• System resource usage
• Improve page speed
• Reduce bounce rate

Use free images or give credit

I know many of us have tried to copy someone, or some text while we were studying in schools.

If you still have that habit, then leave it soon.

Using images from another’s web site or copying of text, also called “plagiarism” in technical language is a thing that Google particularly hates.

If you ponder a bit and awaken your spiritual side, just think of: “Do we ever laugh at the same joke again and again?” 

The answer is NO!

If you think logically, you will get an answer to this question as to why Google does not allow you to copy the images.

The main aim of Google is USER SATISFACTION.

The user will possibly get annoyed and frustrated if he/she keeps on seeing the same content again and again.

Also, we need to give proper credit for the images and text if we have copied it from somewhere.

This is so because of two reasons:

• It does not keep the user lingering about where he has read a similar text. Because we read so many things each day, it is just impossible to remember where you have read about a particular thing unless you have a separate ‘HISTORY’ tab in your brain like Google!😜

• The website from where you have copied the text has made so much effort to draft the text. Google awards the hard workers. If you don’t give proper credit and copy the text, it amounts to plagiarism. Google does not rank sites that have plagiarized content.

In spite of knowing all this, what will really happen if we copy?

It is simple:  GOOGLE WILL BAN OUR SITE! Forget about the first page, it won’t even show up in search results.

Inbound and external links

Is there any difference in the way you feel when you receive appreciation from your mother or a close friend and when you receive the same from your teacher?

I guess you said yes.

Why is it so? An appreciation is an appreciation no matter who makes it!

But the truth is that we feel more valued when we get it from outside sources rather than our own.

The same concept applies to links.

Google has trillions of pages and when we hit the search button the search engine tries to find the most relevant results for us.

The results presented to us are mainly listed based on various factors, one of which is linking.

Linking adds credibility to the site. It is as if someone is pointing to your site and vouching for you. Well, Google feels that if someone is vouching for your site then definitely it is good.

The above refers to external links whereas when we link to a similar article or relevant topic from our own site it refers to as an inbound link.

As an inquisitive person, I always wanted to know why inbound links are also important?

Again it drives us to that point that Google wants user satisfaction.

Google wants people to use the internet more and more and thus if you have internal links to the article they can keep on reading and you can keep people glued to the screens.

For SEO, we need both internal and external/outbound links. Both can improve your ranking in Google.

Outbound links can be ‘ no follow’ or ‘do follow’ attribute but that itself is a big topic in itself. Let us not discuss it here…

If you are interested to know more about it, do let me know in the comments section, I shall be very glad to write about it.

Use analytical tools to keep track of your performance

To stay at the top you need to analyze your traffic on a daily basis. To monitor it on a daily basis you need to use analytical tools.

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google which allows you to analyze your site and optimize it for better performance.

You can use Google search console for fixing URL errors. 

According to Webmaster Central Blog, URL errors refer to “those errors which are specific to a particular page.”

“This means that when Googlebot tried to crawl the URL, it was able to resolve your DNS, connect to your server, fetch and read your robots.txt file, and then request this URL, but something went wrong after that.” 

Google has developed a mobile index. That means you need to check whether your site is loading properly on mobile or else you need to optimize it for that too.

You can optimize it for mobile by using Google’s mobile testing tool.

Conclusion: SEO That Works

Yes, I know you might be feeling there are many more tips for SEO and it is a never-ending subject. Every day is a learning day for an SEO professional.

But with the steps listed above,, you will surely be in the position to do the basic SEO for your website.

On a lighter note, it takes three big alphabets ‘S’, ‘E’, ‘O’ to optimize a site so definitely it is going to be a team effort for a site to rank on Google.

Google wants us all to stay updated and keep reading. Maybe that’s why it frequently changes the algorithms.

As a final suggestion, write for humans and not for the bots and you will definitely rank.

All the best!

References:

1. https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-intent/
2. http://www.seobythesea.com/2009/06/search-engines-and-words-with-more-than-one-meaning/
3. https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-tips/
4. https://backlinko.com/actionable-seo-tips
5. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-apac/trends-and-insights/consumer-needs-research/ 
6. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/
7. https://www.freepik.com/

Author Bio: I’m Chris Wagner, Head of Content @HostingPill. I regularly write about hosting, web servers, and WordPress. I have more than 9 years of industry experience.

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