SEO techniques are what they are – designed to improve your search ranking and drive more traffic. There are some techniques which are so common that we fondly refer to them as basic.
As you will find out from this guide, there are some techniques that are not regularly practiced. However, they are fundamental to your SEO success and quest to attract more website traffic.
About Advanced SEO
SEO involves the use of optimization techniques to improve the search engine ranking of a website or blog. These techniques can be referred to as search engine best practices that site owners have to deploy in order to rank higher.
There are basic SEO tips such as the use of target keywords in all of the posts you create on your site, and also, the use of header tags (H1 to H3), quality content, links (inbound and outbound), and a host of others.
Advanced SEO techniques usually involve more work on the part of the site owner. There is also the need to constantly improve the quality of your content and user experience for your visitors.
This guide presents you with 10 advanced SEO techniques that are very helpful yet easy to deploy on your site.
1 – Boost Your Link Profile with Backlinks from Authority Websites
Building your backlink profile is a basic SEO technique you should already be using. However, it bears repeating due to its importance and the way some webmasters approach this technique.
Google makes use of the quality of your backlinks to discover the trust that your web pages have. The higher the quality and quantity of backlinks to your page the higher Google rates your page in terms of the trust.
That means backlink building isn’t meant to focus on just increasing the number of inbound links to your web pages. Instead, your focus should be on getting as many quality inbound links to boost your link profile and page trust as possible.
The best way to achieve this is to garner as many backlinks to authority websites as possible. Also, you will work on improving the number of outbound links to authority sites.
If you’re wondering what the last statement means, it is simply linking from your web pages to authority sites. Doesn’t that mean you will be passing link juice to those sites?
Yes, it does, but it also means that you are identifying with those sites that Google rates very highly. Think of it this way, each time you link to any other site, you are providing your readers with an option to further study a topic.
Also, your page is found as one with high-quality content having taken the time to research your topic. If you are bothered about spreading your link juice, then you can include the Nofollow attribute in the link.
However, building your link profile for both inbound and outbound links gives you a great boost if they link to authority sites.
2 – Include Target Keywords as Early as Possible
You are probably aware that it is sound SEO practice to include your target keyword in your title, Meta description, and URL.
You should also feature your target keyword as early as possible in the introduction of your content. I’m talking about adding the target keyword within the first 100 words of your blog posts or articles.
What it does is to help search engine crawlers better understand your content and index them properly. This technique also helps improve the relevance of your content based on your target keyword and other keywords you want to rank for.
3 – Leverage on Topics That Have High Google Trust
In the #1 advanced SEO technique stated above, we talked about trust and its importance to how Google perceives and ranks your website. After you have succeeded in building up the trust level of some of your topics, what next?
These topics with high Google trust have obviously brought you higher search ranking and improved online visibility. You can also leverage this success to rank newly-created pages to these topics having higher Google trust.
For example, if you find that one of your pages ranks highly for the topic “freelance writing”, you can build other pages around that topic.
The first step to take is to log in to Google Search Console and visit the Search Results Report to discover your top pages. By clicking on Queries, you will be able to find the actual search terms that visitors used in locating the page.
These search terms will then form the basis upon which to build fresh content on your website. By using any of the SEO tools such as SEMRush or Google Trends, you will be able to discover topic ideas for the search term.
Good advice is to create content using long-tail keywords and also provide direct answers to users’ search queries.
4 – Include Comments for Your Posts
Comments are so common that they hardly pass for advanced SEO techniques. In fact, lots of site owners have the comments section of their blogs disabled.
I do understand if you’re trying to prevent spammers from flooding your site with comments that offer no value. Yet comments have their place and the value they add to your site’s SEO in general.
Comments help to build a kind of community among the readers of your blog posts. Readers are able to interact with you and other readers directly on the pages of your website.
Besides, comments help to extend the time your web visitors spend on your site. This helps to reduce the bounce rate for site visitors because reading and responding to comments require more time on the part of your visitors.
Also, comments can be classified as engagement metrics to show how readers respond to your content. Finally, comments act as proof of how popular the content of your blog posts is.
Those who post comments on your pages are most likely to share the link of your post to others. To manage your content section, ensure to delete comments that do not relate to the post topic, and also respond to those directed at you.
5 – Proper Research on Keywords and Topics
The importance of using the right keywords and topics cannot be overemphasized when it comes to SEO. You will need to research the appropriate terms that your audience is using to search the web.
Google Suggest and related topics are great tools that enable you to search for these terms and phrases. An advanced technique would involve the use of Google Trends to find trending keywords and topics.
The keywords and topics that are gaining popularity could be discovered and used for creating valuable web content.
Also, Google appreciates fresh content that is created around trending keywords and usually rewards content creators with higher rankings. From Google Trends, you can search for these keywords and topics from the ‘Rising’ topics section.
6 – Optimize Load Speed for Your Pages
In an era where everything is done with the speed in mind, everybody likes to have things done instantly. And so it is with visitors who find their way to your website or blog.
They expect the time it takes for your web page to load under 3 seconds. If it takes longer than 3 seconds, then you are sure to experience some of them exiting your page. So how do you prevent visitors from leaving your page before it finishes loading?
The answer is to open your website and pages, so visitors can have a great user experience when they come around. Images and videos are the two major culprits that lead to a slowing down of your web pages.
To combat this, you would have to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to store your videos, images, and other codes that may affect page load speed. This will help to reduce the number of HTTP requests made to your web server and also the size of the page that is loaded.
One other option is the use of a mechanism called Lazy Loading to serve videos and images only when in users’ viewport. This helps to greatly reduce the time taken to load a web page when it is first requested by a user.
This feature can be found in a number of page caching tools such as the WordPress plugin WP Rocket. It’s quite easy to set up as lazy loading does not require any configuration during the setup of the WP Rocket plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, the lazy loading feature takes effect on your pages.
7 – Create Content Targeted at Featured Snippets
It is no secret that Google loves lists and it rewards content that has these lists in Featured Snippets, thereby making these pieces of content more visible to users of its search engine.
You can find a way into the Featured Snippets section if you are able to optimize your content for it. The first thing is to create “how-to” posts, guides, or posts with the listed items in its topic such as “Top 10 Tips for Driving Traffic”.
When you are placing the lists in your content, ensure to position them as early as possible in your post, preferably the introduction or under the first heading. Also, each list item should fall under an H2 or H3 header and keep the list items short.
For the lists, ensure you use <ul> and <ol> and not any other tags.
8 – Use Internal Links to Your Advantage
A well-planned site has the advantage of linking each post to every other post on the website.
This makes it easier for the pages of the website to be crawled and indexed by search engines. One other benefit it offers you is the ability to distribute link juice to the web pages that need it most.
It’s like channeling the resources of a business to a department that needs it the most or a critical unit of the business.
The web pages can earn Google trust on different pages it has which enables you to print these pages to the sites that need the link juice. This will help boost the search ranking of the particular page and position it to bring in more traffic or sales revenue.
9 – Frequent Updates of Top Ranking Pages
It is important to maintain your top-ranking pages in order to keep up with the competition.
Also, you will need to check data and other information included in those posts to ensure that they are accurate. Information may change or become irrelevant in the future and you do not want to be caught up in this.
That’s why you have to make frequent checks and modify any piece of detail that requires changing.
Other details that would require your attention are broken links, media elements, and spammy backlinks. These things have to be updated frequently to ensure that your information is fresh and relevant long after you published them.
10 – Reduce Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a Google Analytics metric that shows you the percentage of visitors that exit your website without interacting with any link. It measures search users who come to a page on your website but leaves within a few seconds.
When a site is having a high bounce rate, it could mean that it does not have pieces of content that are relevant to the search term. It could also mean that the web pages take longer than usual to load on users’ browsers.
Other reasons for a high bounce rate could be that the page contains little or no content, or that the website lacks other pages to link to. If for whatever reasons you find that you have a high bounce rate, you can try resolving the issues mentioned earlier.
There isn’t any clearly-defined figure for the ideal bounce rate but studies show that the top-ranking sites have an average bounce rate of 50%.
So that’s a good starting place if you’re planning to reduce the bounce rate for your website and web pages.
Conclusion
SEO best practices are vital to your site’s search ranking, visibility, and the amount of traffic that flows towards it.
In order to keep your site constantly in the face of your target audience, you would have to maintain sound SEO practices. However, there are some SEO techniques that are little known or not frequently practiced yet they yield great results.
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