Despite what some people would tell you, search engine optimization isn’t all about building links – there are plenty of other factors to consider as well.
So here are five tips which will help you perform better in search engine results and hopefully boost the number of people visiting your site in the long term.
SEO without links: How do I achieve this?
1 – Check out your site’s speed
A slow website can put off visitors, not only does this mean you’re losing out on potential customers but it could also have a long-term impact on your search rankings. Your bounce rate – the percentage of people who visit your site and only look at one page – is used as a ranking factor by Google.
That means if people are leaving because the site is taking too long to load, you could lose your hard-earned visitors altogether.
Use a tool like Pingdom to see how quickly your site loads and compare the results to those of your competitors.
If things aren’t quick enough, you can consider changing your web hosting package, remove unnecessary widgets and compress images.
When it comes to your website, speed is of the essence if you want to improve site’s SEO without link building activities.
Also Read: SEO Tips – Factors that affect your Search Engine Ranking
2 – Make existing content more relevant
These days Google is pretty good at working out what a website or page is about, but you shouldn’t take this for granted.
There’s no need to stuff a page with keywords – just one or two occurrences will let Google categorize it properly.
However, you do need to think about whether a page is relevant to the people who are viewing it.
If, for example, you have a page that’s about buying a certain brand of used car you need to make sure it contains the following things.
- Well written content about the car’s specs and performance
- Images of the vehicle in question
- Details on price and how to buy
- A call to action
- Links to alternative cars you also sell so readers can browse on
Creating this kind of content will ensure naturally occurring keywords on your website and also ensure visitors don’t have to go elsewhere to find the information they’re looking for.
By presenting the alternatives, you also increase the chances of them visiting more than one page on your site.
3 – Improve your meta tags and meta descriptions
Meta tags and meta descriptions used to be a huge ranking factor in their own right, but they were far too easy to manipulate.
However, they are still an important part of the SEO mix as they influence click through rates.
A high click through rate is desirable for two reasons – the first is that it means more people are visiting your site, and the second is that it can have a positive impact on your rankings.
Make sure your meta titles and tags are descriptive, relevant and let people know exactly what they can expect when they visit your site.
4 – Use mark-up
Meta data is still important, but mark-up looks like it’s the way of the future. By using mark-up, you can give Google and other search engines a better idea of what each part of your website is about.
So for example, if you have a reviews page you can use mark-up to let Google know that’s what it’s about.
The snippets you mark-up will then appear in Google’s search results in place of your meta description, giving users a better idea of what’s on the page.
For example, if someone searched “web hosting review” and you had used mark-up, they should see text relevant to web hosting in the results, even if the same page features information about other products.
As with point three, this should boost click through rate.
Introducing mark-up to your site isn’t going to be easy, especially if you have a large site, but it’s certainly worth looking into.
5 – Redirect old pages
If you’ve got a lot of pages all covering the same topic, you should give some serious thought to using 301 redirects in order to consolidate everything into one page.
301 redirects will not only ensure visitors are channeled to your preferred page, but will also pass on the benefits of any links that happen to be pointing to the ones you’re getting rid of.
In fact, whenever you’re deleting a page you should check the value of any SEO links it may have acquired. If it’s a strong page, you should always 301 redirect it to the most relevant page.
So there you have it, five ways to improve your SEO without having to build a single link. Yes, you can gain more; earn more money, traffic by focusing on these SEO without links’ techniques and you’ll be surprised at the result.
What are other methods that you can use to gain more search values without building links either via guest post, commenting or directory submission etc.? Please share them with us below.