SEO Solutions for a Higher Search Engine Positioning
Having the right SEO Solution can be the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful business. When you want to buy something online, I’m sure the first thing you will do is to search the product on Google or another search engine. Getting a high search engine positioning will bring more visitors to your website so I’m sure you will want to learn SEO solutions that can help you improve your rankings. There is no doubt that Search Engine Optimization is one of the best digital marketing techniques that can help you build a strong digital presence.
If you are new to SEO, then we recommend that you first take a look at this on-page SEO guide to first understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization before you try out the SEO Solutions listed in this article.
8 SEO Solutions to achieve a higher search engine positioning
SEO Solution 1: Optimize your Keywords:
You need to pick your keywords carefully when writing your articles. A common SEO solution that people use is to choose long tail keywords and use them within your articles. Long tail keywords are keywords that have less search volume but also less competition. It is hard for a new website to compete with older websites that have a strong backlink profile, so it is better not to compete with them and rank for keywords with less competition. In order to find long tail keywords, you will need a keyword research tool. We recommend KW Finder or KeySearch for finding long tail keywords as these are affordable and also gives you other tools for analysing backlinks, website metrics and keyword tracking.
If you search “keyword density” on Google, you will probably see that all the results that rank on page 1 has the word “keyword density” in the title. The title tells Google what your article is about so it is important to have your focus keywords in the title tags. It is also a very good idea to include the focus keywords in your heading tags because search engines know that the heading tags will provide a rough idea of what the different parts of the articles is about.
Make sure you follow the following best practices for using heading tags:
- Only use one h1 tag per page because it’s the main title of the page and should only be used once.
- Make sure that the header tags are used in a sequence. If you use a h3 tag, it must be used after a h2 tag and if you use a h4 tag, it must be used after a h3 tag.
It is important to mention your focus keyword in your article but don’t overdo it. If you mention your keyword too many times, search engines will penalize you and your search engine positioning will drop. The recommended keyword density is 1-2% and you should never exceed 3%.
SEO Solution 2: Write high quality content
Another very important SEO solution to help you achieve a higher search engine positioning is producing high quality content. Google dislikes thin content and you could get a Google penalty for putting very short useless content on your website. Google wants to show the best results to its users so they will want to rank high-quality content higher in the results. This is why it is important to produce high quality and useful content for your website. One common question that you might think about now is, what counts as high quality content?
As Neil Patel has said, high quality content should have three main characteristics:
1. The content should be deep.
2. The content should have comprehensive coverage.
3. The content should be focused on the topic (keyword) you want to rank for.
From NeilPatel.com
Research has shown that longer content tends to rank higher on Google and this makes sense since longer content implies more detailed analysis of the topic. While Neil Patel didn’t mention long content as one of the three characteristics of high-quality content, if you do all 3, you should be looking at creating content with at least 1000 words.
Our minimum recommended article length is 1500 words, but we recommend 3000 words per article if you want to stay competitive. However, make sure that the content is relevant to the topic. Remember that you can always write about closely relevant topics.
For example, in this article, we discussed some hotel name ideas but we also talked about marketing. If someone is looking to start a hotel and want to get hotel name ideas, they will soon also need to think about how to market their business so we went and discussed that in the article too.
SEO Solution 3: Don’t focus on Keyword Density
We have already mentioned keyword density in the “Optimize your Keywords” section but we want to stress here that you shouldn’t focus keyword density. We will tell you why in a bit but lets first take a look at two examples:
Let’s say that I want to write an article with the keyword, “keyword density” and I write an article with 10,000 words and repeat the phrase 100 times. I have a keyword density of 1% in this situation.
Now, let’s say that my competitor has an article about the same topic with 1,000 words and repeats the phrase 30 times.
My competitor has a keyword density of 3%, while, I only have a keyword density of 1% but I repeated the phrase over 3 times more. Even though my keyword density is lower, I repeated the phrase more which means my content is better optimized for the keyword. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to always get a very high keyword density.
If you have a long tail keyword that is 4 to 5 words long and you repeat it 30 times in an article that only has 1,000 words, it will probably affect the readability of your article. However, repeating it 100 times in an article with 10,000 words is much better in terms of readability because I can put it in the article more naturally without stuffing it into places where it is not needed. You see why longer content is better now?
SEO Solution 4: Have the right link strategy
When people think about links, they always think about inbound links, also known as backlinks. However, the best SEO solution would be optimizing 3 types of links. The 3 types of links are: Inbound links, Outbound links and Internal links. First let’s talk about the Internal links.
Internal link
Internal links are links on your website that links to other pages of your website. The best example is your navigation bar; its links to other pages on your website. Internal links will help Google find new content on your website. Google stated that:
The first step is finding out what pages exist on the web. There isn’t a central registry of all web pages, so Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. This process of discovery is called crawling.
If one of your pages is already indexed by Google and it gains an internal link to a new page, this will help Google find the new page. Remember to keep internal links as do-follow to make sure that Google follows the link and it also passes a small amount of “link juice” to your other pages as well.
Outbound links
No one knows what are the exact algorithms that Google uses to rank pages but lots of people have done tests to see what factors are important for SEO. Some studies have shown that outbound links to high domain authority websites can help you achieve higher search engine positioning since Google will see that you are linking to reputable sources to back up your points, hence also making your website look more reputable.
On the other hand, linking to spammy websites will hurt your SEO so it should be avoided at all costs. If you do have to link to spammy websites, then you should “no-follow” the link.
Inbound links
You can follow all the best practises for SEO and have perfect on-page optimization, but chances are, most, if not all your competitors have done the same. One of the most important SEO solution is building inbound links.
I like looking at other website’s Domain Authority and one thing that I found is that most website with high DA tend to be websites that have been around for longer. Having said that, I have seen some websites with a Domain Authority of 40 that has been around for 8+ years and also seen websites with Domain Authority of 70 that has only been around for around 4 years. I then did some research to see why that has happened. I think the answer is obvious now, the website that has been around for 4 years has built more backlinks.
Backlinks count as “votes” from other websites and websites that get more backlinks will be more authoritative in the eyes of Google so gaining inbound links is one of the most important SEO solutions to gain high search engine positioning. When building inbound links, you should try to link to internal pages or pages that you are trying to rank. You should also be building backlinks to your homepage but most of your links should go to other pages unless the home page is the page you want to rank.
SEO Solution 5: Make sure your website is fast
If your website is slow, it will give your guests a bad user experience. Therefore, Google uses website speed as a ranking factor. Google has an official tool that analyses the speed on your website called the Google PageSpeed Insights. It analyses the speed of your website on both desktop and mobile and provides you with guidance on how to improve the speed of your website.
This is probably one of the SEO solutions that a lot of people fail to use because they use all sorts of animation and lots of images on their website which will slow down their website down. Sometimes, simplicity is best for both the design of your website and your search engine positioning. Here are some tips on how to speed up your website:
Choose a good host:
The easiest way to have a fast website is choose a web host that is fast. If you are unsure which web host has fast servers, you can check their reviews and see what people say about their speed. Of course, remember to also check other factors like their support, reliability, uptime and features. We recommend SiteGround as they have amazing speed, support and uptime.
You should also choose the server location that is closest to your target audience. If you are targeting local customers, then you should use a local web server. This is because the website will load faster for your customers if the server is closer to their location. If you target people from multiple countries, then you should choose the location with the highest percentage of your guests.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of servers from different places around the world with the aim of faster delivery of static content from your server. Remember we said that your website will load faster if the web server is closer to the location of the customer visiting the website. Content delivery networks work by storing your files on multiple servers in multiple locations and when a customer accesses your website, the files will be retrieved from the closest server.
Minify your JavaScript, CSS and HTML
Minifying your code is the process of removing any unnecessary characters in you’re the files, including removing spaces and comments. If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin like Fast Velocity Minify or you can use a CDN like CloudFlare which includes code minifying features.
These are just some tips to help speed up your website but there are many more. Before we finish this section, we will also like to discuss a little bit about speeding up a WordPress website since WordPress is the most popular Content Management system.
To make sure your WordPress website loads faster, you should remove all unnecessary plugins and themes; only keep the ones you really need. For example, there are plugins that add Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel to your website. Ask yourself, do you really need those plugins. The answer is no. This is because you can just manually paste the code snippet directly into the header of your theme so there is no need to use a plugin for this. Plugins slows down your website so you should avoid them when there is an alternative method. Also, remember to install a cache plugin; this is an essential since WordPress websites are generally slow and needs caching.
SEO Solution 6: Spy on your competitors
You are looking for the best SEO solutions but so are your competitors. They want to get a higher search engine positioning than you, but you want to surpass their rankings too. Search Engine Optimization is a war; it is a war against other websites. You want to spy on your competitors to see what they are doing so you can do the same but also do more than them so you can beat them and get a higher search engine positioning.
It is difficult to spy on your competitors without a tool. For this we recommend SEMRush. SEMRush’s comprehensive competitor analysis tools can help you analyse your competitor’s backlinks, keywords, social media activity and much more.
SEO Solution 7: Start Early
Let’s say that you are planning your business now and you will launch it in 1 years’ time. You may decide that you will create a website in 9 months’ time, so it is ready to be launched in a year from now. However, this is not a good idea because SEO takes time to start seeing results. You should create your website now and just mention that your business will be launched in one year. Start building a blog and backlinks; you need to start generating traffic at an early stage so when your business launches in one year’s time, your website already generates some traffic.
Starting early is a very important SEO solution that not too many people use. Use this to your advantage and don’t delay doing search engine optimization for your website.
SEO Solution 8: Domain age matters
Did you know that domain age was a ranking factor? The SEO solutions above are the main ones to help you achieve a higher search engine positioning, but this is just an extra interesting SEO solution for you. Google considers domain age when ranking your website because a well-established website will have been around for a while, which also means they have an older domain name. Spammy websites also tend to drop their domains after a while so they are unlikely to have a high domain age.
How can you take advantage of this? If you are thinking about starting a business soon, you may spend months planning it. It is always a good idea to think of a domain name from the start and buy that domain before you even plan the business. Just let it sit there while you are planning your business, so the domain ages a little bit. This will bring you ranking benefits when you start using the domain. The longer it sits there, the more ranking benefits you get.
Which SEO Solutions are the most important?
This is a difficult question to answer because they all contribute to improving your search engine positioning and Google doesn’t release information on which factors are most important. However, from our experience, here are three of the most important SEO solutions (our opinion):
1. Backlinks
Backlinks are extremely important; if you are just creating a website with high quality content and no backlinks, you won’t go very far. Backlink counts as “votes” from other website and this is crucial for Google to rank your website. We believe that backlinks are the most important factor on our list (our opinion). High authority websites rank the best on Google and in order to achieve high authority, you need a large number of backlinks. You should never stop creating backlinks.
There are many articles that may only have 300-500 words, but they rank on the first page of Google and sometimes even on high competitive keywords. Why? It is because the website has high authority so even shorter articles are ranking higher on Google.
2. Keywords
There are two common mistakes that beginners make when doing search engine optimization. The first is that they use a brand-new website to focus on keywords that are too competitive. Some keywords might have a lot of search volume and looks very tempting to rank but you should start with lower competition keywords and try to rank multiple low competition keywords rather than trying to rank one or two competitive keywords.
The second mistake is that they either use the keywords too many times or not enough. Keyword stuffing will end up landing you a penalty and not using the keyword enough in your article will not bring you very far.
Using lower competition keywords, a suitable number of times is important for ranking your website.
3. High quality content
Yes, a 300-word article can rank top 10 on Google but that is for a high domain authority site. If you created a brand-new site, you will need a high quality and decent length article in order to get an edge against your competitors even if you are ranking on a low competition keyword.
Do you agree with the SEO Solutions we mentioned in this article? Which ones do you think are the most important to increase the search engine positioning of a website? Share your thoughts below.
We hope that this article has helped you plan your SEO strategy and if you have any other SEO solutions that helped you increase your search engine positioning and it was not mentioned here, feel free to leave that in the comments below.
