Another year has gone, and with the series of Panda ranking algorithms that Google has rolled out across the previous year – changing and recreating SEO Campaigns of many search engine optimization firms and making the job of professional SEOs much tougher – it has become much tougher and more difficult to attain, maintain, and improve one’s rankings in major search engine result pages (SERPs).
In order to survive in this world of Panda algorithm domination and against stiff competition from all the thousands of websites out there in the vast domain of the world wide web, a search engine optimization expert must make site’s improvements in order to enhance its search engine rankings.
Here are some SEO strategies to improve your search engine rankings:
Perform SEO Audit. In order to keep your website relevant with high-quality content, gaining new links and visitors as well as keeping visitors satisfied and getting traffic from search engines, a maintenance plan is needed. In order to make an effective and on target SEO services maintenance plan, you must know what’s wrong with your website and what needs to be done.
To do this, a search engine optimisation expert must perform an SEO audit. Playing to your website’s strengths, leveraging it with your site’s optimization, and improving your search engine rankings are an important part of SEO. Prior to endlessly pursuing external links, it is basically important to look at your own site and make an assessment and evaluation.
Provide Quality Content (Check for Duplicate Content)
Google’s Panda algorithm updates’ ultimate goal has always been providing its users with relevant high-quality sites. Google has always emphasized these with regards the reason for the avalanche of Panda updates. So if you want to improve and compete efficiently against all the thousands of competitors for the top SERP rankings, as well as be able to meet the criteria set by Google Panda, you must provide relevant, interesting, on trend high-quality site content.
Regularly check for outdated content, remove dead or useless pages/sections, and check for duplicate content on a regular basis. Keep in mind that there’s no SEO benefits on having lots of pages users never visit and search engines don’t send traffic to.
Improve Internal Linking
To do this, make sure to use keyword-relevant anchor text. Ensure that the keyword(s) you’re trying to get ranked for is what you are using as your anchor text (the text within the link). In doing this, the SE spiders will be able to understand what your target page is about; thus, increasing your content’s ranking strength for that phrase. Another way is to make use of absolute URLs – the complete internet address that specifies the exact location of a file/directory of a website. In this way, it will help spiders determine exactly where the page is located on your site, and if your content gets copied, then at least the links will point back to your website.
Another is making use of text menus as search engine spiders still have difficulty crawling non-text navigation menus. Clean up your links as SE spiders really dislike hitting a dead-end when they are crawling your site. And the cause of these dead-ends are the broken links.
Clean Up Your Link Structure
Your CMS or Content Management System – a system of methods of managing content, workflow, and collaboration online – largely defines your URL structure. It is not necessary to have shorter directory/folders only. You should avoid using dates or number sequences that look like dates whenever possible. Likewise, all dynamic URLs should be converted into static ones to make them user and search-engine friendly.
Make your Site Mobile Friendly
With many more people using mobile devices in making purchases, it is best to make your site more mobile friendly.
Now, with Google having a new crawler, a new user-agent update that can identify mobile content and index it separately from desktop content, it is best to optimize your sites for mobile users.
Evaluate your Site’s Speed
Make sure to make your pages and site as a whole as fast as possible. Google has always been obsessed with speed in their products and on the web. And with the rolling out of their new signal in their search ranking algorithms, site speed, it is now imperative to speed up your site. You can do this by using Google Webmaster Tools and adding a sitemap to your blog.
Regularly check your site performance. Google seems to consider 1.5 seconds or less as a good load time. You can also compress any large images and simplify your code to help speed up your site.
Evaluate and Improve your Social Media Strategy
Nowadays is the time of social media sites. With the escalating popularity of Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, it is no wonder that only a very few website niches haven’t benefited from being involved in social media. Moreover, with Google has started to display Google+ and Pages on search results, it is imperative to have a social media account and improve these accounts.
Get Updated on SEO Trends and News
With Google regularly rolling out Panda updates every now and then, it is a smart move to be updated on them.