Getting to the top of Google search results is the goal of all website and blog owners. The higher you rank in Google search results, the more traffic your website gets. For online shop website owners, high traffic means that more visitors can be converted into leads or consumers. For bloggers, high traffic means that they can sign up for Google AdSense or become an endorser.
This goal cannot be achieved by simply releasing a lot of content without optimization. Because the pages of your website can not rise to the top ranking of search results by itself. Various effective SEO techniques are needed so that your website ranks in Google search results.
This article will guide you to apply SEO techniques based on the latest algorithm updates from Google. SEO techniques are always changing following Google algorithm updates. If 10 years ago a 300 word article stuffed with keywords ( stuffing keywords ) could be ranked at the top of Google, now such SEO techniques are no longer valid. Google is always updating its algorithms to provide the best search results to its users. Search results that are able to answer the searcher's question completely.
Here are the 15 latest SEO techniques to increase your website's ranking and traffic:
1. Install Yoast SEO Plugin
Installing the Yoast SEO plugin is a wise start to a long series of SEO optimizations.
Some of the main features of Yoast SEO are changing title tags and meta descriptions, submitting XML Sitemaps, changing permalinks, verifying Google Webmaster Tools, and analyzing your content. Content analysis is the most attractive feature of Yoast SEO. This feature will alert you if any of your content is not in accordance with the correct SEO rules.
As you can see in the image above, Yoast SEO provides analysis for the use of subheading, sentence length, and article length. You don't need to check the completeness of the content manually so that the process of applying SEO techniques to content can be completed more quickly.
2. Add Website in Google Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is a free platform for website owners to monitor how their websites are performing in Google's organic realm. Google Search Console allows you to find out which domains provide links to your website (referring domains), website performance on mobile devices, to analysis of website pages with the highest traffic.
Here's how to add a website to Google Search Console:
Google Account Login
Open Webmaster Tools
Click Add Property
Select "Websites"
Select “Website” from the drop-down menu and enter your website URL. Make sure you write the exact same URL as the URL that appears in the browser.
Click "Continue"
Choose How to Verify
Google Search Console provides several ways to verify your website, from uploading HTML files, domain name providers, HTML tags, or Google Analytics tracking codes. Choose the one you want.
Add Domain Separately
If your website already supports http:// and https:// versions, add them separately.
Also read: Google Search Console Complete Guide
3. Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of all the web pages that can be accessed by visitors and search engines. With a sitemap, your website will be easier to find by search engines and indexed faster. The sitemap will also notify search engines when there are changes to the structure of the website. Creating a sitemap is a basic but very important SEO technique.
There are two types of sitemaps, namely XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is accessed by search engines, while an HTML sitemap is one that is accessed by visitors. You can read a full explanation of how to create an XML sitemap and an HTML sitemap in this article .
4. Install Google Analytics
SEO Techniques - Google Analytics illustration
Apart from installing Google Search Console, you also need to install Google Analytics. Google Search Console and Google Analytics have different functions. The main function of Google Search Console is to check the website's performance in search results, while the main function of Google Analytics is to identify the behavior of website visitors.
With Google Analytics, you can find out the movement of visitors from the first page they visit to where they close your website. In addition, Google Analytics will also help you find out which pages are generating the most conversions and which are less than optimal.
Follow the guide How to Install Google Analytics in WordPress to install Google Analytics on your website.
5. Increase Website Speed
SEO techniques - website speed illustration
One of the things that most website visitors hate is slow loading. Long website loading makes website visitors irritated and they end up looking for other websites that can provide faster information.
No matter how good the content you create, website visitors have no tolerance for slow loading. According to Google, 53 percent of internet users leave websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. In addition, 79 percent of people who are disappointed with the old loading website stated that they would not return to the website again. Increasing website speed is an On Page SEO technique that must be done in the world of SEO.
Also read: How to Speed up Blog Loading for Your Site
6. Keyword Research
Not doing keyword research before creating content is a fatal mistake for website and blog owners. Keyword research will help you find keywords that are relevant to your readers. There are five keyword research indicators that you need to pay attention to, namely search volume, keyword difficulty level, keyword suggestions, SERP, and search intent.
First, search volume is the number of searches for a keyword in a certain period of time. Second, the keyword difficulty level shows the difficulty level of a keyword to be on the first page of search results.
Third, keyword suggestions are a collection of keywords related to the keywords you are researching. Fourth, SERP or Search Engine Result Page shows the pages that occupy the top 10 rankings in the search results for the keywords you are researching. Finally, search intent is the intent that searchers want for a keyword. One keyword can have more than one interpretation and Google prioritizes the interpretation according to the wishes of the searcher.
Also read: 9 Ways of Keyword Research for Blogs and Websites
7. Target Long Tail Keywords
There are two types of keywords based on the number of words in them, namely short tail keywords and long tail keywords. Short tail keywords are keywords that consist of one or two words such as "create a blog" and "create a website"
On the other hand, long tail keywords are keywords that consist of three or more words such as “ how to create a blog with WordPress ” and “ how to create a blog with Blogger ”. The search volume for long tail keywords tends to be smaller than short tail keywords. However, long tail keywords are more effective at bringing in traffic. According to Neil Patel, long tail keywords bring in 70 percent more traffic than short tail keywords.
8. Create Complete and Interesting Content
When people search for a keyword in a search engine, they want a complete answer so that it can solve the problem they are facing. Google also realized the needs of its users and began to prioritize complete content to occupy the top positions in search results.
You can add illustrations, infographics, or videos to complete the article. Visual media will help readers to understand the content of your article easily. If they are satisfied with your full content, it is not impossible that they will share the content on social media.
Also read: How to Write Good and Correct SEO Friendly Articles
9. Image Optimization
SEO techniques - tinypng homepage
Adding images to your website/blog content is a great way to keep visitors from getting bored with the text. In addition, images can also help visitors to understand your content. However, you also need to optimize the images you upload so that they don't slow down the loading of your website or blog.
There are many ways to optimize images on your blog, from manual to automatic. Get the full explanation in the article How to Optimize Images in WordPress .
10. Maximize Internal Links
In addition to backlinks (external links), internal links also play an important role in SEO optimization. Internal links are links from one page to another on the same website.
Internal links help search engines understand the context and relationships between pages on a website. Google prioritizes websites whose content is interconnected and you can show the relationship between that content through internal links.
Internal links indirectly also help increase the time visitors spend on your website/blog. With internal links, visitors will more easily move to other pages on the website to read content related to previous content. The more internal links that visitors click, the more pages they visit on the website. This means the more time they spend on your website.
11. Guest Post
Guest posting is writing articles not to be published on their own blog, but on other people's blogs/websites. In the article there is a link that points to your blog/website. This method is quite effective for getting quality backlinks.
In order to generate quality backlinks, you need to choose carefully the website that will publish your guest post. Choose a website or blog whose quality is much better than yours, both in terms of traffic and domain rating. You can work with influencer bloggers or online media to do guest posts. SEO techniques with backlinks are the basic SEO strategies that can be relied on until now.
12. Post on Medium
SEO Techniques - Medium main page
Social media is not the only platform you can use to share website/blog content. Another platform worth taking advantage of is Medium. Medium is a community journalism platform with 60 million monthly readers .
Medium allows you to republish your website content on its platform and provide canonical links. Canonical link serves to tell search engines that two identical content as one URL is the same so it will not damage the SEO reputation of your website.
In addition to the import feature, you can also publish new content that is still related to your website on Medium and put a link to one of the content on your blog. Even though it only contributes no-follow links, the second way is still worth trying to promote your blog or website.
13. Check Link
Take a look at the articles that you have published one by one. Almost all of these articles most likely contain links / links, both internal links and external links. Your initial intention to put these links is to make it easier for website visitors to move from one page to another or to access information resources from other websites.
Unfortunately, sometimes the links expire. Expired links will redirect visitors to inappropriate pages or even 404 error pages . This can reduce the quality of the visitor experience.
Therefore, you need to do regular link checks so that visitors are always directed to the right page. To do a link check, you can use Google Search Console and you can read the full explanation in this article .
14. Meta Optimization Tags
When you do a search on Google, you will see the search results as below:
After writing content consisting of thousands of words, only a small part of it will appear in search results. The search results only show meta tags which consist of title tags and meta descriptions like the example above.
First, the title tag is the title of your article that appears in search results. The title of the article should not be too long because Google will cut it and adjust it according to its standards. Second, a meta description is a short text that summarizes your content in search results. This text is located just below the article title and URL. Meta descriptions usually consist of 110 to 120 characters.
Your challenge is to be able to make the title as attractive as possible without going over the limits set by Google. In addition, you must also be able to summarize the entire content of the article into 110 to 120 characters.
15. Update Old Content
Consistently creating new content for your website or blog is indeed a good step. However, that does not mean you can ignore the old content that you have published. It could be that the content is a source of traffic that is not less than the new content.
There may be a lot of old content where the performance could still be improved. Before optimizing old content, you need to do an evaluation to determine which content has the potential to generate traffic.
You can do this evaluation using the help of Google Search Console. Through Google Search Console, you can find out the performance of each website page in search results.
Find high impression content with low CTR. This situation indicates the content has appeared in search results, but not many people have opened/clicked on the content. Usually this is caused by a lack of keywords that match the intent of the searchers.
To check the performance per website page in Google Search Console, follow these steps:
– Open the Performance tab
– Click Pages
– Select the website page you want to see performance on
– Then click the “Queries” tab
– After that, keywords that generate impressions will appear for the page.
Based on a report from Queries, you can supplement the information in the article using the keywords that generated the impression for the page. That way the possibility of the website page to appear in various keywords is greater. Your articles will be increasingly rich in information that matches what people are looking for in search engines.
Conclusion
Implementing this set of SEO techniques does take a lot of time. It takes patience and consistency to get satisfactory results from the 15 SEO techniques above. So prepare your energy to go through the long process of this latest SEO technique. Good luck with the SEO techniques above!
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