Are you looking for some easy SEO strategies for 2021? Here are some great tips to get you started.
While the digital world has changed drastically over the years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has remained an effective marketing strategy for online businesses. However, it is crucial to note that SEO can either make or break your business, depending on your practices.
Good SEO practices will go a long way to improve the position of your website on search engines such as Google. Search engines do not interpret web pages the same way humans do. This makes it important to understand some of the algorithms used by search engines when it comes to ranking sites.
So, what are some of the easy SEO strategies and practices that can help your website get ranked top by search engines? Below are some of the easiest SEO strategies for 2021:
Optimize for Mobile | Easy SEO Strategies
In 2015, Google mobile searches outnumbered desktop searches. This played a huge role in making Google prioritize mobile indexing. Therefore, you cannot afford to ignore mobile SEO in 2021, especially if you are looking to be ranked among the top websites on search engines.
Wondering how to optimize for mobile? Here are our top east SEO strategies for mobile optimizations. Various search engines have recommendations that need to be followed in regards to mobile SEO. However, some of the common practices that most search engines look into include:
Responsive Design
How is the user experience of your website? You might not know this unless you check your site on various devices. Ensure that your site can accommodate various screen sizes and that it's optimized and responsive for various brands. Otherwise, you will easily turn away visitors due to horrible design on their device.
Minimal Pop-Ups
No one can tolerate a site full of intrusive pop-ups. Pop-ups can get bad sometimes, to an extent they cover your entire screen. It even gets worse when you cannot figure out how to close the pop-ups. Ensure your site is free of pop-ups if you do not want to deal with high bounce rates. However, there are a few tricks for having pop-ups without necessarily having to annoy your audience.
Page Speed
Most visitors to your website will not be patient enough to work with slow load times. Therefore, you have to ensure that you have an optimized speed. You can improve your page speed by minimizing directs, minifying codes and optimizing images.
Prioritize Local Searches
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Look at it this way, you might have great content but without SEO you will be lost on page maybe 30 of search engines. On the other hand, you wouldn't rank top on search engines if visitors don't find your content useful or at least relatable.
Relatable and Helpful Content | Easy SEO Strategies
SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Look at it this way, you might have great content but without SEO you will be lost on page maybe 30 of search engines. On the other hand, you wouldn’t rank top on search engines if visitors don’t find your content useful or at least relatable.
So, how do you write great content that is SEO-friendly? Below are some tips for easy SEO strategies for content:
Have Your Audience in Mind
What are your intentions when writing content for your website? Most website owners create content for the wrong reasons. Your ideal content should be of interest to your target market. Put yourself in your audience's shoes and think of some of the questions they might have. Note, you should not only focus on marketing your products and services. You can also give some attention to other industry related content that could be helpful to your audience.
Have Catchy Headlines
It's your content's headlines that will determine if a visitor will continue reading your content or not. A catchy title is all you need to get the attention of your audience. Your headlines should not only be catchy but also clear and with rich keywords. Your Meta descriptions too should elaborate further about your title. Keep in mind that it's the title and Meta descriptions that appear on search engine results, so make them count.
Use Keywords Correctly
Besides using keyword rich phrases on your title, be sure to use them throughout your content as well. Using keywords throughout your content will make it easy for both your audience and search engines to know what your article is all about. Be careful not to use too much keywords. Such could not only turn off your audience but also could result to search engines penalizing you for keyword stuffing.
Properly Structure Your Content
Besides creating great content, you also need to ensure that the work is well organized with an efficient format. Have a title for your work and also break it into smaller paragraphs. This practice will make your content engaging and easy to read. For search engines, ensure to use proper tag hierarchy (H1 for titles and H2 for subtitles).
Internal and External Linking | Easy SEO Strategies
Linking to content from other websites as well as yours is another great and easy SEO strategy and practice. Linking plays a key role increasing your site’s traffic. More linking will lead to more traffic to your site and thus more customers and sales. However, you ought to learn good linking practices as not all linking will benefit you. Below are some of the things to consider when using linking for SEO purposes:
Have Lots of Content
If you intend to have lots of internal linking, then that means you must have lots of internal pages with great content. Having lots of pages with great content will give you the opportunity to build a great internal linking structure without any complications.
Choose Anchor Texts Wisely
You can also take advantage of internal linking when attaching images to pages of your site. Use anchor texts instead of linking images. However, you have to pick your anchor texts carefully to avoid making them look spammy. For instance, the anchor texts you use should be natural and have sentence fragments that have not been optimized.
Use Relevant Links
Linking is an effective way to boost user experience as well as drive more traffic to your website. However, you cannot link to just any webpage. The pages that you link to should have content that's related to the page you are linking from. Link to pages that let your audience read more about a concept or pages that answer questions regarding a topic they are currently reading about.
Call to Action
Internal linking can have a significant impact on conversions such as Call-to Actions (CTAs). A call action is not restricted to a contact button. It can be anything from reading more to maybe purchasing a product. Ensure you have a CTA at least on every page of your website. This will boost your site's traffic in a great way.
Page Loading Speed | Easy SEO Strategies
You might not be affected by your website’s pages loading slowly but your visitors will be. Monitoring your bounce rate and page load time will help you enhance your website to give your audience a better experience.
What’s the ideal web page speed? Well, your web pages need to load as fast as they can without necessarily compromising your audience’s experience. For instance, if you want to be ranked top on Google, your pages need to load within a blink of an eye.
Various factors can affect the page loading speed of your site. Some of these factors include the device being used, browser, the content on the page, and the web hosting provider. Thus, understanding your visitors needs well help you know on what to improve.
So, how do you improve the loading speed of your website? Below are some tips to help for easy SEO strategies with page loading speed:
Reduce Redirects
Your visitors have to wait for HTTP request-response cycle to be completed every time a page redirects to another page. This is additional waiting time that could drive away your visitors. Therefore, be sure to avoid redirects whenever possible.
Work on Server Response Time
Some of the factors that could affect your sever response time include; resources being used by each page, software being used by your servers, amount of traffic being directed to your site, and your hosting solution. To improve on your server's response time, look for issues such as slow routing or maybe inadequate memory and work on them.
Optimize Images
When using images in your web pages, always ensure that they are in the right format, not larger than they should be, and that they are correctly compressed for the site. You can use CSS sprites to combine images into one large image that loads at once. This means fewer HTTP requests and less loading time.
Make Use of Web Analytics | Easy SEO Strategies
Web analytics is a crucial tool when working to optimize your site. This is mostly because it gives you an insightful data of how well your site is performing. Besides that, web analytics help you understand how visitors behave on your site.
Through web analytics you will be able to get your visitors details such as their name, age, location and the traffic source that led them to your website. Besides that web analytics will help you know which content brought more traffic to your site, and the total number of conversions. All this information will give you a hint of how to satisfy your audience. This is vital to see the results of you implementing these easy SEO strategies.
While web analytics can be used to analyze and give detailed information on a wide range of metrics, it can be categorized into three broad categories. Below are the main types of web analytics and how they benefit businesses:
Audience Data
Web analytics provide you with demographic data such as age and location to help you understand your audience better so you can create a more effective online communication. The demographic data is crucial to determine how well you are meeting the needs of your customers. Generally, audience data analysis involves the following metrics: · New visitors- people visiting your site for the first time · Returning visitors- repeated visitors · Device breakdown- the devices used by visitors to visit your site · Location- the geographic location of visitors when on your site
User Behaviour
Understanding how visitors interact with your website is crucial as it will help you find ways of increasing traffic and conversions. As a website owner, the insights you get from web analytics will guide you on what you need to adjust to boost the user experience of your site. This particular web analytics is mainly concerned with the traffic coming to your site and the user browsing experience. You can easily learn which pages get more traffic through making use of behavior metrics. Besides that, you also get to learn which pages engage visitors longer. In short, user behavior web analytics will give you metrics on; bounce rate, time on page, clicks and conversions.
Website Performance
Monitoring the general performance of your website is important as it will help you identify technical issues that could be affecting the user browsing experience. Visitors won't dwell on a site with technical issues such as too many redirects and slow page loading time. Identifying such technical problems will give you a chance to rectify them and thus increase the number of visitors staying on your site. Website performance analytics will provide you with metrics such as; uptime, load time, keywords, and impressions.
In Conclusion
The above tips are some of the common easy SEO strategies and practices that will help you get ranked high on search engines and also get more traffic in 2021. However, search engines algorithms change from time to time. So, always visit your previous content to determine if it’s still relevant. Be sure to make changes if you find any content that could be irrelevant due to changes in search engines algorithms. Or rather, you can redirect the page to a page with more relevant content that’s up to date. That way, you will be able to maintain the social media shares, backlinks and other on-site engagement metrics.
