How To Improve Your Ranking: 5 Quick SEO Tips

Your website has been online for quite a while now, but you are, however, not happy with its ranking? You are asking yourself what you can do to rank on the first page rather than the second one? Or how to get from the bottom of page 1 to the top? This is not as difficult as you may think. All you need to do is follow some quick tips and implement them as good as possible. Then your ranking will improve almost by itself. We will show you five simple tips to boost your website.

Tip 1: Internal Links

A good internal link structure is one of the things that is most likely to be forgotten when it comes to ranking. However, a good internal linking is very important as search engines can crawl websites with a good link structure better. In addition, a good internal linking is a real ranking booster. But: the way, how internal links are set, is essential. A well-meant breadcrumb navigation falls too short. How to set internal links:

• Link subpages from as many subpages as possible.
• Link them from within the text. These links have more power than links from the navigation or footer.
• Link subpages with the link text you want the page to be found by. This is a clear signal for Google. And don’t forget the link title as this is also important for Google.

An excellent example of setting internal links and achieving an impact is Wikipedia. Have a look at some articles and especially at the links to other Wikipedia articles.

Tip 2: Improve Your Content

I know, this sounds pretty banal, but it is important enough to take the risk of sounding trivial. Imagine you are the one searching for something and encountering your website. What would you expect from it? Does it meet your expectations? Does it help you in solving a problem? Here are some tips and suggestions to improve the content:

• Check your content from different perspectives. Is it problem-solving? Is there something about any potential case?
• Google your topics and pay attention to questions. Can your website answer these issues?
• Avoid deserts of text. Instead, jazz up your articles with pictures, graphics, and videos. Have you done this already?

Tip 3: Enhance the Click Rate in the Search Results

A good ranking will get you more clicks, right? If your website doesn’t have a good ranking yet but a striking number of clicks, this is a signal for Google: Your content must be relevant for the entered keyword. This results in a better ranking. How to improve the click rate:

• Rephrase titles and description. They should make users want more and practically “force” them to visit your website. You could describe a problem and offer a solution. Keep in mind that your site should then meet these expectations.
• Use special characters for titles or descriptions. This makes your entry stand out from the mass and attracts attention. See example 1.
• You can also use Google Rich Snippets to highlight your entry. Easy to use and applicable to almost every website are “feedbacks”. See example 2.

Examples: The German retailer Otto uses special characters in the description to distinguish itself from others. You can do that, too! Here you can find an overview of HTML special characters: Entity Code Highlighting a search result with Rich Snippets could look like this:

Tip 4: Enhance Interaction

Not only the click rates but also the bounce rate and the time spent on the site are relevant indicators. As Google increasingly pays more attention to these indicators, you should optimize them. Both indicators can be improved by an increased interaction. This means nothing more than that a visitor browses through your website. Good examples are the German news sites T-Online.de and Spiegel.de T-Online: The second paragraph has a “More about the topic” box that tempts the user to read more about the topic and spend more time on the site. The “Current topics” box on the right-hand side of the article is also a useful feature. Spiegel Online: On the left-hand side of the article, you can find essential interaction features like the “Topic” box that provides all links to the topic (here: Pegida) and a video below.

Concretely: Which Elements Really Help

There are certain things that increase the time spent on the site and reduce the bounce rate. It is imperative that these items are placed close to the article. They probably work best within the article. These simple things can have a significant effect:

• A “More about the topic” box
• A video
• A picture gallery
• A survey
• Links to other articles

Tip 5: Loading Performance – All You Need Is Speed

There are so many reasons to improve the loading performance of a website with the main one being the visitor of the website followed by Google.

• The website performance is an official ranking indicator for Google. From an objective point of view, it is also a ranking indicator for visitors. The faster the information is loaded, the higher is the chance that visitors browse sub pages of your website and spend more time. This doesn’t go unnoticed by Google and improves your ranking.
• The loading performance also has influence on the Google Adwords Quality Score.
• Many big websites like Amazon, Walmart, or Firefox test the effects of the loading performance on their business. These tests have always proven that a better performance directly influences sales.

Here is an infographic about the importance of the website performance [Clicking on the preview opens the full infographic] Before we enter the world of WordPress optimization, here's our own extensive collection of more than 40 tools every SEO chevalier should definitely check out. To improve the loading performance of your WordPress website, just follow the short tips below. You should start with testing the initial state of your website with the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool.

3 Quick Tips for a Better WordPress Website Performance

If you want more tips around WordPress for Admins visit our article here. Tip 1: Activate compression and caching through .htaccess Activate the compression and browser caching in the .htaccess file on your server (or web hosting package). Add the following code to the .htaccess file in the root directory of the server.

################### Activate compression ######
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

################# Activate browser caching ######
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month 1 week"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month 1 days"
ExpiresByType text/xml "access plus 1 seconds"

This method should speed up your website if it isn’t already activated. Tip 2: Use a caching plugin The website itself should be cached, too. The caching plugin turns a dynamic PHP page into a static HTML page. The browser can load these faster as they don’t have to go through the PHP interpreter. I recommend Cachify if you use WordPress. This plugin works perfectly and is free. Download Cachify from WordPress.org Note that should you use a CDN WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache are better choices as Cachify does not cooperate with offsite URLs. Tip3: Bundle and compress JavaScript and CSS Another plugin bundles CSS and Javascript files, and compresses the bundled files as much as possible. The result is that less and smaller files are loaded. This gives your website a dramatic performance boost. I recommend the small plugin Autoptimize. Download Autoptimize from WordPress.org

Conclusion

If you follow these easy tips, your Google ranking should improve immediately. Start implementing what really matters for SEO by setting internal links and checking your content.

Related Links

• About Rich Snippets structured data
• 50 Best SEO Optimized WordPress Themes
• Entity Code – A Clear and Quick Reference to HTML Symbol Entities Codes
• Google: Using site speed in web search ranking
• Google: Understanding landing page experience
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Download Cachify from WordPress.org
• Download Autoptimize from WordPress.org

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