5 Quick SEO Tips to Help to Get Higher Search Engine Rankings

 Search Engine Optimization is a long-term process that heavily involves on-page optimization, link building and other SEO techniques. Generally acquiring quality links is harder and more time-consuming compared to the on-page optimization. That’s why on-page optimization is a great white-hat way to boost your rankings in a short period of time.

In this post, we will review five quick & easy SEO tips that can help you improve the rankings of your website in the major Search Engines.

1. Optimize the Page Titles

Rewriting the non-optimized titles of a website is a very good technique to affect the search engine rankings and increase the click through rate in a short period of time. The page titles are HTML elements located in the HTML Header and they are very important both for the search engines and for the users.

Generally, page titles should be short (less than 64-70 characters), they should be descriptive and they must contain the main keywords of the page. At the same time, titles should be attractive to the user in order to increase the clicks that come from the search results.

So, if you want to boost your search engine traffic, make sure that your website contains pages with unique, attractive and descriptive titles.

2. Optimize the META-tags

The META-tags are HTML elements that are placed in the HTML Header and that contain info about the page. The three most popular metatags are the meta-description, the meta-keywords and the meta-robots.

Meta-description is one of the most important metatags in SEO since it usually appears as a snippet (brief description of the page) in the search results. Keep in mind that the meta-description elements should be short, generally less than 150 characters. Additionally, since they appear in the search results they should also be attractive and describe in the best possible way the content of the page. You can learn more about meta descriptions from Matt Cutts here
and here.

Meta-keywords is the second most popular metatag, but nowadays it does not have any significant value for SEO. Matt Cutts has made it clear in the past that Meta-keywords do not affect search rankings (check the video) and that webmasters should not spend any time on this.

Meta-robots is another popular metatag that affects the crawling of search engines. This element specifies whether the particular page should be indexed and whether the outgoing links should be followed. The default value is “index,follow” and my suggestion is not to change this value unless you know what you are doing.

So, in order to positively affect the search engine results make sure you spend time writing optimized meta-descriptions and ensure that you use the proper meta-robots values.

3. Work on Your Internal Linking

The internal linking is one of the most important factors that affect the SEO campaign. By internal linking, we refer to the way that the pages of the site link to each other. Generally, the main principle is to keep the important pages of a website as close as possible to the homepage. By linking directly to those pages from the main page you increase their pageviews and you pass to them valuable link juice (PageRank). Thus, if you want to boost the search engine rankings of a particular internal page of your website make sure you link directly from the pages that have high PageRank values and from the homepage.

4. Mind the Keyword Usage

One of the most important steps of SEO copywriting is creating a list with the main keywords that describe a page and with all the popular terms that the users could use to find the page in the search engines. After identifying the main terms, it is essential to select the most important ones and incorporate them in the title, meta-description, HTML headings and text of the page.

Keep in mind that relatively increased keyword density is a very common characteristic of optimized terms. Nevertheless, you should not focus only on keyword density, but rather on keyword rank, which measures how optimized is a particular term in one page. A good tool to measure the keyword rank of your keywords along with the relevance of your Title, Meta-description and HTML headers is the Keyword Analyzer tool. While analyzing your pages with it, make sure that the important keywords of your page have relatively increased keyword rank (within the green area) and the non-important ones have low (within the red).

Thus, in order to achieve better rankings, rewrite the text of your site and ensure that your pages are optimized for the correct terms (high keyword rank).

5. Use the Available Tools

Another quick and easy way to improve the search engine indexing and crawling is to use the available tools. Make sure that you use XML sitemaps in order to make it easier for search engines to find and index your pages, submit your site in the major search engines by using their Webmaster Tools and monitor frequently the results of your actions by using a Web Analytics service. Don’t forget that in order to improve the SEO status of your website you must use the right tools.

All the above techniques, along with effective link building, can help you achieve better results in the search engines and increase your organic traffic. Remember that the most important technique to achieve high ranking is to develop quality content for the users. After all content is the king.