Did you know that most of the content on the internet is not optimized for search engines? However, did you know that many people still rely on Google to find information? If so, you might be interested in a guide to some of the best white hat SEO techniques.
This piece will explain 10 of the most effective SEO techniques you should use if your goal is to get more traffic and increase sales with your website. And best of all: These methods are 100% black hat-free. But before proceeding any further, it’s always advisable to leave the SEO work for the experts if you do not know about online promotions.
Consider Hiring a Professional
Often, people think hiring a professional is expensive. But in reality, it doesn’t have to be. Many SEO experts on the market are willing to work with you at affordable prices, and they’ll often provide great value for your money.
Hiring an SEO expert, like Brooks Internet Marketing, will fetch you many advantages:
- You’ll save time and energy by hiring someone who knows what they’re doing instead of learning it yourself.
- In addition, you’ll save money in terms of lost revenue from poor search engine rankings or increased costs due to excessive manual labor for your team.
- You’ll avoid making mistakes (e.g., keyword stuffing) that could lead to penalties from Google and other search engines.
Effective SEO Techniques That Are a Must Addition to Your Marketing Strategy
1. Using RankBrain
One of the best ways to stay ahead of the curve and gain an advantage over your competitors is to implement RankBrain. You may have heard about this machine learning algorithm, but if you haven’t, here’s what you need to know:
- Google uses RankBrain to understand a searcher’s intent when they enter a query into Google’s search engine. It then determines your website’s relevance for that query based on its content and other factors, such as backlinks.
- RankBrain helps determine where your website will rank in SERPs. The higher up on SERPs your site appears, the more traffic it gets from people searching for relevant content on Google.
So, how can you get started with RankBrain?
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Use keywords that searchers will use when looking for your content. It is especially important if you’re trying to rank for a specific term or phrase.
- Make sure the content on your page is relevant to what users are searching for. The more relevant your content, the higher it’ll appear in SERPs.
2. Ensuring Website Security
Website security is an important aspect of SEO. If your website is not secure, it won’t rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You can do many things to ensure that your website is secure and ready for ranking purposes. To begin with, ensure that all the information which users enter into forms or fields on your site is encrypted via HTTPS/SSL before sending them out over the internet. Also, ensure that all third-party plugins used by you or any other user on your website are updated regularly to ensure they contain no vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.
Additionally, you must protect yourself against brute force attacks by using strong passwords or locking out failed logins after a predetermined number of attempts. It will prevent anyone from guessing at these credentials randomly until they find one that works successfully.
3. Optimizing Content for Featured Snippets
Optimizing content for featured snippets is an effective way to increase organic traffic. Featured snippets are search engine results showing a visually enhanced answer box directly below the traditional result, typically a snippet of your content.
Featured snippets are usually displayed when a searcher is looking for a quick answer to their question. The search engine tries to provide the most relevant result based on the user query and, if possible, with additional information like ratings, reviews, or direct answers from Google.
4. Optimizing for Voice Search
The future of search is voice-based. As we’ve seen with Google Home and Amazon Alexa, this trend is only beginning to take off, but it will become more important in the coming years. Recent research shows that around 120.4 million users were using voice assistant services in the US in 2021. These numbers are expected to reach 130.1 million users by 2025. Hence, it is becoming essential for every business to optimize their websites and apps for voice searches.
Voice search has several advantages over traditional text-based queries:
- It’s conversational.
- It’s natural and intuitive, as if you were talking to a friend.
- It’s mobile-friendly (no typing necessary.
- It’s more accurate than typed queries because voice recognition technology can differentiate between different accents or dialects of English. The best thing is that they can even detect sarcasm.
5. Publishing Long-Form Content
In this day and age, long-form content is the king. It’s more likely to be shared, indexed by search engines, and read by users. Moreover, it’s also more likely to be read by search engines, which means that if you publish long-form articles for your website, you’ll get more traffic from Google in no time.
6. Using Schema Markup
Schema markup is a structured data markup language that helps search engines understand the content of a webpage. As a result, you can also improve search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience.
7. Picture Optimization
Picture optimization is another technique that you should be aware of. It’s a strategy that helps search engines understand the content of your images, which will help improve their ranking in image searches. Like other SEO techniques, it doesn’t change the image itself. Instead, it optimizes the file name and its alt tag for search engines.
To do this correctly,
- Use descriptive filenames, don’t just call it “picture1”.
- Be sure to add an alt tag with text describing what’s in the photograph or video, for example, “A picture of me holding up my cat.”
8. Enhancing the User Experience and Usability
When you think of SEO, what comes to mind? Keywords? Links? Backlinks? Page load speed?
All of those things are important when it comes to SEO, but they’re not the only things. User experience (UX) and usability are even more important than keyword optimization. If a user can’t find what they’re looking for on your website or understand what’s on each page, then all of your efforts will be worthless.
The UX is how users interact with a website and what happens when they click around through different pages and links on the site. The usability is how well users can use the site. For example, can they find what they’re looking for or go through all the steps necessary to complete a task like purchasing something from your store online?
9. Making Your Website Mobile Friendly
A recent study from Zippia states that over 294 million users use a smartphone in the US alone, accounting for 47% of the total web traffic. It shows that people are getting more comfortable exploring websites on their phones. Hence, you should make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. It means that it will work well on a smartphone or tablet.
- Search engines: A mobile-friendly website is more likely to be found by search engines and therefore ranked higher on their results pages.
- Consumers: Mobile users are growing in numbers, and so is the number of people using apps, which means that it’s important to help them find what they need quickly and easily.
- Social media: People share content from websites all over social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. However, this is only possible if those links open properly in their newsfeeds or timelines. When this happens, viewers are more likely to stay longer on the page, which increases the chances of engagement with ads embedded within those posts. That might lead them further down your sales funnel.
10. Link Building Boosts All Other Efforts
A link-building strategy is one of the most powerful tools to drive traffic to your website and boost search engine rankings. It’s also a surefire way to establish yourself as an authority in your industry.
In other words, when it comes to SEO, links are the cornerstone of everything we do.
- They’re important for search engines;
- They’re important for people;
- They’re important for your website;
- They’re also important for your business and reputation online.
Whether it’s through an article or blog post that you publish on another site or by reaching out directly via email or social media, many different ways link building can help advance both personal and professional goals.
SEO Techniques to Boost Your Website Ranking in the Long Run
SEO is a long-term strategy, not a quick fix. It requires patience, persistence, and a continuous process to achieve. It means you must be committed to optimizing your website regularly for the long haul.
SEO is not a one-time activity like other marketing strategies but requires continuous optimization efforts so that you can reap benefits for years down the line.