How to Improve Your Websites SEO Ranking Positions in 2016
So if you're a webmaster or blogger or Internet Affiliate Marketer, you are probably aware of what SEO is by now (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a multi-million dollar business and you need to do it (or get it done) in order to get your site ranking higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
But some people seem to think that SEO is simply a matter of building lots of links to your site from anywhere you can get them and as quick as possible. No no no! This is seriously wrong and doing that will probably get your site penalized and your rankings will tank or worse, Google will deindex you. SEO is an art. It's a science. But it's not rocket science. And you'll need to do it if you want your customers to find your site in the SERPs. But you'll need to do it properly and not expect to get #1 overnight!
Why Does Your Website Need to do SEO?
Doing SEO on your website will increase it's ranking in the SERPs so that it increases your Search Engine presence. Any website that sells products, services or simply wants to get more Search Engine (organic) traffic will need to do SEO. And with more and more people getting online today and searching the Internet for reviews, testimonials, information or comparisons. By doing SEO and gaining better rankings for it, it's your site that they will possibly find for those reasons.
Essential SEO Ranking Factors
So you've got your site up, you've spent weeks/months adding tons of great content to it. You've tweaked your site a billion ways and have considered all the many on-page SEO ranking factors. Now you're ready to do some off-page SEO on your site. But there are some things you should know about off-page SEO as well before you start. It's not just about building a ton of random backlinks to your site. These days, Google puts a lot of emphasis on the quality and "relatedness" of those backlinks. Google has rolled out tons of algorithm updates that take a lot of things into consideration when ranking a website in its SERPs.
Just some of those ranking factors include;
The quality and relatedness of your backlinks.
The speed and rate you earned/built them (link velocity).
The age of the site that the backlinks are from.
What the link profile (backlinks) of that site are.
Your own websites age. The older, the better.
How fast your site loads in peoples browser.
What your bounce rate is. The lower, the better.
What the UX (User Experience) is by your visitors.
What your Social Media presence is like (how many social signals, likes/shares/tweets/pins/comments etc).
Building and Earning High Quality Backlinks
Building and earning high quality backlinks is one of the most important things you can do for your site. Next to creating killer content! But you must be really careful about where these links come from.
Back 7+ years ago, you could build a ton of random links to your site and it would rank you higher virtually overnight. I remember the days when I used to buy 100,000 forum profile links to my sites and they would knock my competitors out the water. Do that today and you'll get a manual penalty quicker than Usain Bolt can run the 100 meters!
But these days, Google's algorithm has changed so much and now looks for quality rather than quantity. It's long been known that links from sites in the same niche as yours are worth their weight in gold. Just one link from a good site that is related to your is worth more than 10,000 links from sites that aren't.
But getting, building or earning backlinks is not really that hard a process. One way of "earning" high quality links is to create high quality content. So high in quality that blogs and sites and forums and everything else in your niche can't help but link to it. This creates natural organic backlinks from related sites to yours which are the best type of links to earn.
If you can't earn links, you'll need to build them. But you'll have to find sites, blogs, forums etc etc that are in YOUR niche and then find ways you can build a link to your site from them. The most obvious way is to do guest post blogging. Contacting blogs in your niche and asking if you can write for them. They get free content and you get a link to your site which can look very natural.
I've posted many guides here already on how to build high quality backlinks to your site. One other way of doing it (as well as building up recognition) is to do high quality blog commenting. Commenting on blogs in the same niche/industry as yours. But only posting amazingly high quality comments thet the owners rush to click "approve" on.
There are many other ways to build related backlinks to your site. Forum posting is one such way. Search out the best and biggest forums in your niche. Join them and start posting away on them. Don't just post links at first but post valuable replies, answers and threads that establish you as an authority and expert in your niche. Then later on post some links or put your site in your signature area so it shows on all your posts. Over time, the more you do this, the more high quality, related links you'll build to your site which will increase your rankings as well as possibly send you some targeted traffic from those posts as well.
Another great way to build high quality, high authority backlinks is to use Web 2.0 sites. Since there are a dozen or so of these that are free to join. You can do so and place some content on them that is related to your niche. When you have a Web 2.0 site with 10+ articles on that are, then that is a Web 2.0 site that is related to your site. So you can use them to build high authority, related backlinks to your site. Sites like Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, EduBlogs, Tumblr, Wix, Weebly etc etc.
Social Signals
It's long well considered now that Search Engines use socials signals (and how many you have) as a ranking factor. Social signals are kind of like backlinks in that they will be where someone has shared your blog post or product or something onto their Social Networking site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc etc. And since Search Engines are constantly crawling Social Media sites everyday, by having lot of followers and activity on your Social Media pages such as your Facebook Fanpage, Twitter profile, Instagram profile etc etc, having them can really help boost your ranking positions in the SERPs.
Getting, building or earning social signals is done in a similar fashion to getting and earning backlinks too. By creating awesome killer engaging content that your readers will love, find useful and want to share this on their own Social Networking sites with their friends and family and anyone else that cares. This also applies to the content you create on those Social Media sites, your posts, updates, images, videos etc. Getting people to share them on again and again will all help to increase your ranking in the SERPs.
Website Age
The age of your website is an old ranking factor. The premise being, the older the site, the more ranking authority it will have. Google and any other Search Engine wont rank a 1 day old website at #1 for "weight loss". It takes time and work to get there. SEO takes time and building high quality, high authority related backlinks takes time. And should do as well. But Google knows that new sites wont have any links or trust to it so wont rank it high straight away. You need to build authority and trust and votes to your site. You can think of each backlink you get like a vote. With the more votes it has, the more trust it has and the higher it will rank it. Although website age isn't as important a ranking factor as it used to be, it still plays a large roll in where you will rank online.
How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking?
On-Page SEO
SEO comes in two parts. The off-page SEO which involves building links (link building) and earning them! As well as increasing your social presence, likes, shares etc etc. But if you want better rankings, your on-page SEO is just as important as your off-page SEO. And to do on-page SEO you must optimize your site so that Search Engines can properly crawl and index it. On-page SEO covers many different things from increasing your site speed, using sitemaps and having good structure and navigation. To properly optimizing your content and HTML so Search Engines can clearly see what your site is all about.
How to do on-page SEO?
One of the best ways is to just keep writing and writing and writing! Even if you don't have all the other things taken care of that make up good on-page SEO, you can out value them by just producing sheer amounts of very high quality content. Content that is engaging and informative and ever green and valuable to the readers who want to link to it, share it with people and write home about it.
Some important on-page SEO optimization tips are;
Making good use of header tags, H1, H2, H3 etc.
Using META description and META titles.
Using ALT keywords in all of your images.
Using Open Graph META tags.
Using Schema Markup in your HTML.
Creating good internal links.
Just to name a few! These things alone are a great way to improve your on-page SEO but there are many other ways in which you can optimize your site and improve its on-page SEO score.
One good way to check the on-page SEO score for newbies. Is to use some free on-page SEO checker tools. Such tools include;
Running your website through these tools will give you tons and tons of tips on how you can IMPROVE the on-page SEO score and rating of your website.
Website Speed
The speed of your website (how fast it opens and loads in peoples browsers) is a huge ranking factor today. Simply because slow loading sites have a high bounce rate and that's a seriously bad thing for your rankings! Google likes to return sites in its SERPs that people find valuable. One way of determining that is by how fast people bounce off that site and click back to the SERP results again. If your site runs slow, is laggy and pages aren't opening or loading properly, people will get annoyed and leave your site faster than a bat out of hell!
Having a fast loading website is imperative if you want to get high ranking positions in 2016 and beyond. You can use Google's PageSpeed Insights Tool to get some information into how fast your site is loading as well as some tips on how to increase its page load speed time too.
UX (User Experience)
Most people don't think that UX has anything to do with SEO. They think that you just need good backlinks and good on-page SEO. WRONG! Providing people with a great UX on your site will mean they will like using that site and be more likely to share and recommend it to people. Providing a good UX will improve your SEO in the long run because like providing great content, people will be more like to share, recommend it and link to it. A site that provides an abysmal dire UX never has the same amount of returning visitor, backlinks and social signals over a site that does. If your site is tough to navigate or doesn't work properly or parts of it are down or broke or people can't find what they're looking for easily. They will never come back to that site again and will even go as far as slating it and saying bad things about it.
Providing a great UX to your visitors/readers and users is something that you'll be constantly doing and evolving with through time. You'll always need to be working on your site, improving features and making it better and easier to use for your visitors.
Mike's Final Conclusion
SEO isn't something you need to do once and forget it. It's something that constantly evolves and you'll need to evolve and adapt to that to survive and keep up with the race. You'll need to always be working on your off-page and on-page SEO. Always providing a fast loading and fully working site. And always publishing amazing viral content that earns you backlinks and social signals. There are many on-page/off-page SEO ranking factors to take into consideration.
One of the best tips to improve your SEO is to always keep publishing amazing, original, high quality and highly informative and engaging content. And even if you can't do this yourself, you can always hire high quality professionals and freelancers and article writers to do it for you.
Here on Seocheckout you can find many professional SEO freelancers that can help you to improve your on-page SEO. You can find many professional grade writers to write content for your site. And you can find professional grade SMM's (Social Media Marketers) to help you improve your Social Presence too. Plus a plethora of amazing, white hat SEO services also. Really, quite frankly, seocheckout has everything you need to improve your on-page and off-page SEO and Search Engine rankings.
I can not tell you about all the services, or SEO "Gurus" creating services that will completely tarnish your SEO rankings. There is many services that provide thousands of low quality, unrelated content backlinks. These buyers usually drop in the rankings and wonder why their website is ranked lower after ordering. It's best to just get quality backlinks with content that is similar to your own, and to also use social networking sites for the social signals. This is what I do, and my websites seem to do fine with their keywords. Hopefully some sellers, and other freelancers will see this post and make changes.Great post, Mike!
I can not tell you about all the services, or SEO "Gurus" creating services that will completely tarnish your SEO rankings. There is many services that provide thousands of low quality, unrelated content backlinks. These buyers usually drop in the rankings and wonder why their website is ranked lower after ordering. It's best to just get quality backlinks with content that is similar to your own, and to also use social networking sites for the social signals. This is what I do, and my websites seem to do fine with their keywords. Hopefully some sellers, and other freelancers will see this post and make changes.
Yes I agree with you here Everett, I have seen some just plain scary services that I would never ever use.Yes I agree with you here Everett, I have seen some just plain scary services that I would never ever use.
Regarding link velocity, what exactly is the best practice on this? For example, if you get a lot of backlinks in a short period of time but then all of a sudden you drop in getting new backlinks for a while, Google will probably interpret your initial gain of backlinks and un-natural right?
And for the first weeks of getting a lot o backlinks, will you rank a lot better and then as soon as you lose that link velocity will you just drop in ranks?
I always wondered how Google can make a difference between "unnatural links" and natural links from a "viral period".Regarding link velocity, what exactly is the best practice on this? For example, if you get a lot of backlinks in a short period of time but then all of a sudden you drop in getting new backlinks for a while, Google will probably interpret your initial gain of backlinks and un-natural right?
And for the first weeks of getting a lot o backlinks, will you rank a lot better and then as soon as you lose that link velocity will you just drop in ranks?
I always wondered how Google can make a difference between "unnatural links" and natural links from a "viral period".
Thanks Mike, geez this post too me a while to read simply because it was packed full of really great information!
I am getting quite nifty with my on-page SEO now but I find that I don't have much time left for off-page SEO because my time is taken up with creating content. I do quite a bit of social media marketing but when it comes to backlinking I am left behind LOL.
This is something I choose to outsource when I have the time. I really want to start buying a monthly service for each of my websites at some stage in the future.
I just have one question for you Mike, I have never come across this term before: Using Open Graph META tags. What does this mean?Thanks Mike, geez this post too me a while to read simply because it was packed full of really great information!
I am getting quite nifty with my on-page SEO now but I find that I don't have much time left for off-page SEO because my time is taken up with creating content. I do quite a bit of social media marketing but when it comes to backlinking I am left behind LOL.
This is something I choose to outsource when I have the time. I really want to start buying a monthly service for each of my websites at some stage in the future.
I just have one question for you Mike, I have never come across this term before: ?Using Open Graph META tags. What does this mean?
Hi Mike thanks for your totally nice information. I read your full details and you did included excellent information point by point for on-page and off-page SEO. As a profession SEO skilled I know all of your explain parts and I completely agree with you. All those part is so importance for site ranking currently on search engine. But problem is most of the website owner does not know all these issue and even they do not want to insist on those part, They just expect backlink either getting suggesting for on-page SEO. I think your topic will help to all very much.
Keep going on for such nice post again and again
Regards by AjlancerHi Mike thanks for your totally nice information. I read your full details and you did included excellent information point by point for on-page and off-page SEO. As a profession SEO skilled I know all of your explain parts and I completely agree with you. All those part is so importance for site ranking currently on search engine. But problem is most of the website owner does not know all these issue and even they do not want to insist on those part, They just expect backlink either getting suggesting for on-page SEO. I think your topic will help to all very much.
Keep going on for such nice post again and again
Regards by Ajlancer
The social signals are the easiest to scatter in the internet especially when you have a very active account in social media and that you are a known face there. All you need to do is to post about your website from time to time. Of course, it need not be spamming. You have to be creative in attracting your friends in social media to your website. From what I had read recently, those social signals have a value with search engines algorithm.The social signals are the easiest to scatter in the internet especially when you have a very active account in social media and that you are a known face there. All you need to do is to post about your website from time to time. Of course, it need not be spamming. You have to be creative in attracting your friends in social media to your website. From what I had read recently, those social signals have a value with search engines algorithm.
Everett
I can not tell you about all the services, or SEO "Gurus" creating services that will completely tarnish your SEO rankings. There is many services that provide thousands of low quality, unrelated content backlinks. These buyers usually drop in the rankings and wonder why their website is ranked lower after ordering. It's best to just get quality backlinks with content that is similar to your own, and to also use social networking sites for the social signals. This is what I do, and my websites seem to do fine with their keywords. Hopefully some sellers, and other freelancers will see this post and make changes. Great post, Mike! I can not tell you about all the services, or SEO "Gurus" creating services that will completely tarnish your SEO rankings. There is many services that provide thousands of low quality, unrelated content backlinks. These buyers usually drop in the rankings and wonder why their website is ranked lower after ordering. It's best to just get quality backlinks with content that is similar to your own, and to also use social networking sites for the social signals. This is what I do, and my websites seem to do fine with their keywords. Hopefully some sellers, and other freelancers will see this post and make changes.
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