Ways to Improve Your SEO Rankings in 2021
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing your websites organic visibility for search engines. SEO involves editing a website to make it more search engine friendly, and then promoting the site to increase its relevance on the Web.
Here are my top tips on how to improve your SEO ranking in 2021:
Backlinking
Backlinks are links from one website to another website (in this case, yours). Google consider backlinks as “votes” for a website, and pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.
Methods of Back Linking Include:
Guest Blogging
You can earn quality backlinks through guest blogging on relevant sites. Remember to make the content high-quality and relevant for the websites readers. You can find guest blogging opportunities by searching terms like the below.
Unlinked Mentions
Find unlinked mentions of your brand, then ask the author to make the mention clickable.
Press
Up your PR game by looking for articles and feature opportunities. This could be a founder interview or a press release on your new product launch. A link from a high quality publication can hugely boost your SEO.
Broken Link Building
You can do this by finding relevant dead links on other sites, then reaching out and suggesting your working link as the replacement. (You can do this by using a broken link checker).
The Skyscraper Technique
Dig for relevant content with high number of links, improve it, then ask those linking to the original to link to your website instead.
High Quality Backlinks are More Powerful.
It’s key to note that high-quality backlinks tend to be more powerful. High quality backlinks usually:
Come from Trusted and Authoritative Websites.
For instance, if Forbes linked to your website, Google will recognise it as high quality. In contrast, Google might recognise a smaller or less optimised site it as lower quality, and thus, will rank it lower in search engines. This concept is known as “Domain Authority”. Essentially, the more authority a site has, the more authority it can pass on to your site (via a link).
The website linking to yours is topically related to your website.
Ensure that the website linking to your site is relevant to your industry or audience.
The link is from a domain that hasn’t linked to you before.
Reoccurring backlinks from the same website tend to lose their power. It’s usually better to get 100 links from 100 different websites than 1,000 links from the same website.
Phew — that’s backlinks! What about some other techniques to improve your SEO?
Bounce Rates
A bounce is a single-page session on your site. Typically, the lower the bounce rate, the better, but this does vary depending on the purpose of your website. For instance, if your website is a simple landing page for data collection (one call-to-action), a single-page session isn’t so bad. However, if you’re an online store, you’ll want your customers to be exploring different pages and products. You can find your bounce rate on the analytics page of your website.
A high bounce rate may indicate to Google that your website is not relevant to those clicking on it, hence, why they exit after a single-page session. A high bounce rate is often a symptom of weakness in other SEO factors.
Methods to lower your bounce rate include a faster page load time, user-friendly navigation, a clear product offering, and the avoidance of cluttered advertisements.
Meta Titles and Descriptions
These are simply what shows up on a search engine. A compelling meta title and description has the power to raise the click-through rate (CTR) of your organic search results.
Keep them clear, easy to read and captivating. I’d recommend descriptions between 50–160 characters, including relevant key words that your customers will be searching.
Keywords
These are the keywords and phrases in your content that make it possible for people to find your site via a search engine.
You can use a keyword research tool to discover average monthly search volume and similar keywords. For instance, typing “mothers day” and “florist” into a keyword research tool, you might discover highly relevant, searched for related terms, such as:
- Mothers day bouquets
- Flowers for mums
- Mothers day flower shop
Load Times
We’re so used to having things instantly — we’ve become impatient. If your website takes a while to load, it could cause your visitor to get frustrated and leave your site. In fact, 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less. And 40% will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds.
You can reduce your load times through methods such as reducing the size of your images and avoiding landing page redirects.
Moving Forward
Changes in your SEO can take 4–6 months on average to start seeing results. So be patient, and remember to stay on top of your SEO if anything on your website changes.
Tools
I’d also recommend using tools like Alexa SEO, or Chrome Extensions like WooRank’s SEO Analysis and Website Review tool.
About the Author
I’m Kate, an SEO auditor and e-commerce entrepreneur from London. Follow me for more useful content on everything entrepreneurship!
