Increase Your Website Ranking with these Advanced SEO Strategies By James Tredwell on October 3, 2019 When you are trying to improve your website ranking, where do you focus on when seeking SEO Services? SEO is a complex web marketing concept that covers several elements and not just keywords. It reaches a point where keywords are not improving your SEO and you start wondering what you are doing wrong. Stop wondering and start putting more effort into other elements other than keywords. Besides rating keyword relevance, and metadata according to user reaction terms, search engine algorithms also evaluate other factors like bounce rate, pages viewed, and the amount of time spent on your site by a visitor, inbound and outbound links and many others. One way to improve your website ranking is by making users stay in your site along as possible with engaging and interactive content as well as improving the user experience. I am not implying that using keywords will not work but it is halfway through your SEO strategy. The other half is where you need to put more emphasis. What makes visitors stay on your site longer is user-friendliness. In this post, I will tackle various aspects of web usability that affect website ranking. Read on for inspiration. Website usability involves several elements of website design tied to conversion. Here are a few SEO strategies that impact your website ranking. Effectiveness– Imagine yourself as a website visitor who is going through a site. Can you find what you are looking for? Do you see the products you desire? And if so does the website makes it easy for you to purchase the products? Efficiency–Efficiency complements effectiveness. Effectiveness won’t impact anything if the website is not fast enough. Visitors have little time to spare and more information to acquire. If your website lacks effectiveness and efficiency, the next website is just a click away and won’t hesitate to leave and never return. This will increase the bounce rate and also the overall SEO ranking. Learnability–Is your website intuitive enough for users to navigate through without getting stuck somewhere? One way to make your website learnable is to have a consistent call to action so that visitors can easily interact with you. If getting information from your website takes too long, visitors are bound to get frustrated leading to clicking away and never to return. Memorability–Is your website easy to remember? This boils down to your URL. Is your domain name easy to grasp and remember? Are the keywords associated with your website memorable enough? Like I said keywords are important and shouldn’t be downplayed. Therefore, use search phrases that can direct visitors easily to your site. Error Prevention–Certain website errors affect both user experience and SEO ranking. Such errors include 404 pages not found an error, broken links, or links that don’t have relevance to your site. What effect does usability have on your website? If your website is not user-friendly, it will be penalized by the search engines by being placed at the bottom of the search pages. This means you won’t appear at the first few pages of Google or other reliable search engines. The reason being, search engines favor user-friendly sites with high usability. Your site has to have a high number of relevant keywords and can engage with visitors. You will improve your SEO ranking by convincing your visitors to stay longer on your website, view more pages, and coming back again. Now that you know how important usability is, here are other elements that contribute to a high website ranking. 1. Use high quality and relevant content Dwell time refers to the amount of time spent by your visitors on your site. It can affect your SEO ranking positively or negatively. If your visitors don’t spend enough time, your ranking is likely to go down. Comprehensive quality content makes users stay longer on your site, consuming all the juicy relevant information that your site has. This increases the dwell time and pushes the SEO ranking up. A detailed blog post of about 2000 to 2500 words will rank higher in search engines. Longer content doesn’t necessarily mean better ranking but it provides you with a greater opportunity to give more details in your content, therefore, making it informative. You will also include more keywords and incorporate more outbound links. High-quality content also ranks better when visitors bookmark your website on Chrome. 2. High Page load speed Page speed loading is among the things Google and Bing consider when ranking websites using their algorithms. A few seconds is enough to make your visitors love or hate your website. This also affects the dwell time. If a visitor has to wait for more than 5 seconds for a page to load, they end up leaving your site leading to a high bounce rate and reduced page views. These two will damage your overall SEO ranking. To increase your site’s performance, you can use cache plugins, using streamlined and clean code, using optimized images on your website, minimizing redirects, and reducing plugins used in your site. The conversion rate is improved by using high-quality images since the majority of online visitors find them trustworthy. 3. Optimizing Images There are other ways of making sure that images benefit your SEO ranking, besides formatting and resizing them. By using keywords for your image file name, alt tag, title, description, and captions, you make your content relevant to search engines that will up these keywords and display them in the first pages. 4. Header tags One thing that puts off readers is a wall of words or text. By improving the format of your content, you make it user-friendly. Readers will fall in love with your content and spend more time on it and this triggers relevance in search engines. By properly using Meta tags, your content is broken down into sections making it easy to read and understand. Have you ever wonder why visitors will prefer one content over another? It’s because they are well presented in an easy to grasp manner. Header tags keywords also carry more weight in search engines and including relevant search terms in your header tags boosts your SEO ranking against those keywords. 5. Outbound links You can also make your site useful by linking out to authoritative websites to give your readers extra content for more information. Linking out to sites with higher domain authority doesn’t only contribute to your relevance but also sends trust signals to search engines and improve your search ranking. Keep it on average though, since too much information doesn’t mean better information. 6. Use Different Multimedia To enrich user experience images, videos, slideshows, and audio are quite helpful. You need to convey your messages suitable for an ideal website visitor. They also show quality in content to search engines. Unique requires a lot of work from the best SEO Services to make it look good and appealing. Final Thoughts Keywords are important for any SEO to work, but should never be stuffed rendering the content confusing and flow less. Readability is also affected when you stuff keywords in one place. Stuffing keywords weakens the writer’s vocabulary making the content difficult to comprehend. Outbound links improve your SEO; however, overusing them is destructive to the reader, especially if the content has no relevance to your topic. Footers should not be overloaded as it confuses the reader who is looking for certain key pages. You may need to strike a balance between site traffic and optimal user experience, especially in the short-term.