SEO TIPS: HOW TO GET TO THE TOP OF GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS IN 2020

SEO has always been an effective way of increasing organic traffic to your website, but according to Copyblogger it is amongst the most misunderstood and mysterious practices for internet users. 

So, why does Search Engine Optimisation remain such a mystery for everyone? 

Probably because it is one of the digital marketing niches that is being constantly modified and updated. The search engine algorithms are changing frequently, and many of the techniques that you might have successfully used a year or two ago might be completely useless today. 

That is why staying up to date with all the changes and knowing all the best SEO practices and latest trends to boost your traffic are the crucial parts of successful Search Engine Optimisation.

In one of our blog posts, we have already discussed what is SEO and how it works and also explained its meaning, how crucial it is and also discovered some of the needed basics and ways to improve ranking on SERP. Now, we will get more in-depth with the effective techniques and SEO tips and tricks which will develop your skills, enhance the SERP of your website, and, ultimately, increase traffic to your website as fast as possible.

So what are we waiting for? 

Work on your website optimization

• We know, it sounds very obvious, but don’t jump to conclusions just yet. A properly formatted site will impact your performance drastically, so make sure that your website is neat, clean and organized. 
  
  Be reasonable, don’t overweight it with visual elements, italics, coloured fonts if you don’t want the user to get an epileptic seizure and leave it instantly. 
  
  Remember that bad, uninspiring and chunky design will always make a negative impact on your engagement with targeted audience and ranking and probably will resolve in you making it into the “Worst Websites of 2019” list just like Pennyjuice:

• Moreover, a slowly-loading, bulky webpage will likewise make a dramatic effect on your organic traffic income. According to Neil Patel’s article, an average mobile user leaves a site if it takes over 4 seconds to load.
  
  So impatient, right?
  
  In addition, a slow loading speed will also be a negative indicator for Google, which will inevitably affect your ranking. 
  
  There could be a lot of reasons for your site to be slow, starting from an unclean code and too much advertisement, up to a bad hosting and poorly optimized images.
  
  So how to improve site speed? 
  
  Once again, make sure that your website is not overfilled with elements. If you know that there are unnecessary parts that can be deleted, just do it.  
  
  The same applies to your code. The “insights” should be as neat and optimized as the facade of the website. Compressing the code and reducing the file sizes, such as images, can make an unbelievable effect on your website’s loading speed and performance. 

• A little hint – in a search for inspiration always look up to the greatest. For instance, check out Overflow’s site:

A perfect case of an amazing colour usage and smart minimalistic design. The visual elements are aligned well and understandable, all the information is distributed gradually to give the best experience. And most importantly, the loading speed is just great.

• The occurrence of when visitors are abandoning a website shortly after visiting is called Bounce rate. 
  
  To fight that, you ought to work on your sites loading speed and invest in good visuals of your page. 
  
  Placing engaging messages, call to action and visuals on the first page that the user sees will have a great impact on the engagement rate, because according to Sweor article it takes about 2.6 seconds for a user to land on the area that most influences their first impression, so what the user sees on the first page he stumbles upon, or landing page, would be the main trigger of positive or negative impression of the overall site.
  
  In order to make sure that all possible mistakes are resolved and that your website delivers the best user experience, a professional examination of  your digital infrastructure from a competent third party would be a great idea, as it will allow you to get recommendations on how to raise the performance of the website and optimise it to give better user experience.

Produce high quality content

• In order to be rated highly by Google and be interesting for internet users, your need to ensure the relevancy, high quality and constant production of your content. Nicely-made and useful content is literally one of the main reasons for your visitors to keep coming back to your website. 
  
  You should know that nowadays Google values expert authorship in content making more than ever before. Be creative and interesting, include all the fresh data, statistics and research that you can find.
  
  Don’t forget to provide legit facts that prove your point on the matter, as this will not only ensure visitors of your competence in the topic you are talking about, but also will raise your authority and a chance of other websites linking to you as an authoritative source of information. 
   
• Furthermore, drawing on Eric Enge, last year Google has intensified its focus on content quality, which means the more you dive into a particular topic in your content, the more valuable it will be in the eyes of Google search engine, so make sure that you are creating a unique content, that goes much deeper than scratching the surface of a topic and has different angles and points of view. In order to do that, you ought to make sure you follow some of the main points of how to create high quality content and put them into usage:
  • Make sure to always avoid plagiarism. Use quotations or your own words in the topic you are writing about;
  • Information is power, but quite frequently it can simply be misleading, incompetent, or just completely wrong. To ensure the quality and legitimacy of the information you are providing, make sure you dive in deep into the topic and use multiple information sources while researching it. 
  • Develop a unique style of your own. Obviously, a style is not being developed overnight, but you should remember that like in the case with visual elements, your text should be precise, nicely-paced and well-written in order for the user to enjoy it and remember you as a great content-maker, returning to your website.
  • Use examples to prove your point, both visual and written. Arguments, empowered with examples or facts, will be much more plausible for your audience. So once again make sure that the information you are giving is legit and provide the user with good proof. 

• Last but not least, content creation has a lot to do with the above-mentioned website optimisation, as your main goal is not only to make the content interesting, but also optimize it for the best user experience.
  
  Make sure that your website is readable, never forget that it is your audience who you write for. The information has to be demonstrated to the user in a clear, simple, and logical way, which will make him stay longer on your website and will raise the chance of him coming back to it.
  
  The amount of time which the visitor spends on your website has a term dwell time. If the dwell time of an average visitor is quite long, this will indicate to Google that “this site was relevant and helpful to people that visited it!”, which will give you a great benefit in the long run. 
• Once again, never hesitate to look up to the best examples to improve the quality of your content.
  
  Niel Patel’s blog, for instance, is an amazing case of wonderful content making. In his blog, he gives the information to the user in a straightforward, understandable way, making sure that all the examples given have proof, for which he uses official statistics in images and information from other authoritative resources.
  
  Neil mostly writes about digital marketing techniques and tips, a topic which could be quite deep and complicated, especially for a novice internet user. That is why frequently he is giving useful information through images, graphs and videos, simplifying it in order for everyone to understand.
  
  This, altogether with an unforgettable personal style, makes him one of the main influencers on the web and his content one of the most valuable in the niche. 

Use keywords properly

• For all of you out there wondering how to get to the top of google search results, there is an ultimate solution – keywords.
  
  We have already mentioned keywords, their importance and the ways of placement of them into the text in our last article.
  
  But always remember not to oversaturate your content with them, as abusing keywords is strictly penalised by Google. Make it as natural and seamless as possible and, what’s more importantly, use the right keywords that are relevant to the content you are creating.
• You can implement various interesting techniques such as using images for sneaking in keywords into them. By placing keywords into the titles, captions and description, or alt text of the images, you will give your page a more powerful keyword background, which will obviously impact your Search Engine Results Page rating.
  
  Your main goal here is to make images more user-friendly, which means optimizing their file name and alt text, which is a written description of the image which appears on the page if the image could not be loaded.

Check out these two examples:

Which one looks more informative for you?

Obviously, the second example contains much more useful information both for internet users and the search engine.

The same applies to the image caption. It is a little piece of info that accompanies the image, written below it. It serves as a provider of more detailed information about the image, such as a person’s authorship of a photograph like here.

• Try putting long tail keywords into usage.
  
  We are all familiar with short tail keywords due to the simple fact that we use them every single day of our life.  They are general search queries, consisting of three words or less. They have a high Search Volume, which is a term used to defy a number of searches for a certain keyword in a period of time. The reward for using them is high, as they can give you a massive load of traffic and help you rank higher on google.
  
  However, using a short tail keyword will result in your page competing with others in a very general topic and if your site is not authoritative yet, this is a battle that you will probably lose.
  
  And that’s the exact reason for you to use long tail keywords.
  
  They are low volume, specifically-focused search queries that are easily used due to low keyword difficulty but tend to bring a reasonable amount of organic traffic to the website if used in the right way. That is because of a low competitiveness for a certain keyword that you use.
  
  Moreover, people tend to use long tail keywords when they’re in a search for something specific, which results into their higher targeting nature or, in plain language, they are making your desired customers to search for you.
  
  So, for example, if you are trying to rank for a short tail keyword “SEO”, you are destined to inevitable loss, as this keyword has tons of searches every month.
  
  Pretty big competition to beat, right?
  
  On the other hand using something like “search engine optimization tutorial for beginners” will have a much higher chance of getting ranked high in search results due to a lesser search volume and more topic-focused query.
  
  Have a look on this Ahrefs Article that explains pretty well how to find long tail keywords and why they are an amazing instrument to attract traffic. 

Work on your Meta Title and Description

• Things you do on your webpage have to be engaging and artistic, but your Meta Title doesn’t.
  
  Meta Title is the name of your page that will appear in the search engine when an internet user is searching for a particular query.
  
  Furthermzore, it’s one the most important places where you ought to insert your main keywords of the page. Don’t forget that H1 and Title are the first places that Google checks out first in order to understand what your page is about and how to rank it.
  
  Of course, you might want to get poetic and make the most beautiful headline that this world has ever seen, we understand that. But before you go all berserk with that meta title, we will have to disappoint you – a meta title is limited to a max amount of 65 words.
  
  That’s why we advise you to make it as short and informative as you possibly can, your main goal here is to motivate the internet user to make that click and go to your website.
  
  For that you have to make a title that meets the expectation of the person who is searching for something. 
• The same applies to meta description – a little part of info on the result page, which contains a short description of the page that user is about to go to. Make it descriptive and relevant to the content.
  
  The recommended length of a meta description is around 50-160 characters.
  
  It might not be the main way to improve ranking substantially, but don’t underestimate it, because a proper description can attract a decent amount of organic traffic.

Put Outbound links into usage

• Outbound links, or external links, are the ones that will redirect a website visitor to other resources on the web.
  
  In most of the cases, they are used as quotations, backup or fact-providing sources.
  
  Why are they important?
  
  Well, as it is said in one famous proverb: “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are”. You see, a search engine can learn quite a lot about your website judging from who you link. If you build your linking profile properly, a search engine will develop trust in your website. 
• Moreover, it boosts your reputation not only in the eyes of the search engine, but also in the eyes of the website users.
  
  So make sure to double check all the domains that you refer to, as it directly impacts the relationship with your audience. 
• And finally, outbound links help in establishing ties with bloggers, websites, communities, etc.
  
  Acknowledging their work is raising the chance of them returning the favour, giving your site some of these tasty links from authoritative resources.
  
  You can also facilitate and boost this process by outreaching to people or websites you are referring to and asking directly to get links from their resources.  

Conclusion

To sum up everything above, we can say that SEO is a very interesting and deep niche which evolves and changes everyday. If done in the right way, with gradual and thoughtful steps, search engine optimisation can bring you a lot of benefits.

Besides everything else, our main advice would be this: be creative with your SEO, never stop learning and search for new ways to improve your strategies.

And also make sure to subscribe to RGray Blog Updates, as we are constantly creating useful and interesting blog posts on how to do seo yourself and search engine optimization for dummies, full of great practices for you to implement in your digital marketing journey.