Does my site speed affect SEO?

The website speed determines the timeframe of a server response, how fast the content is loaded and how much time it needs to be ready for use, and how much time average users spend on a page. This ranking factor is so vital that Google makes it one of its top priorities when evaluating what to show first. If it takes forever to load, it will be penalized by Google and the visitors who will leave in the first three seconds. So the algorithm will mark it as less important and thus less visible. Optimizing the website speed is so beneficial that Google prioritizes a fast, responsive server over relevant content, taking more time to load. The standard applies to both desktop and mobile versions.

Does blogging improve SEO?

If we consider proper SEO optimization, blogs are an unavoidable part of it. Bloggs itself doesn’t affect ranking, but it is an opportunity to incorporate a variety of factors that boost visibility and improve website authority. They provide a method to target a specific audience by providing additional information and increasing organic traffic. A blog post should be relevant to website content and serves further explanation of the desired topic. When creating a blog post, the content must address, resolve and provide relevant information. So throwing random stories and misleading the visitor will do more harm than good as Google monitors the time spent on a specific post. The algorithm assumes that if the user leaves quickly, the page hasn’t satisfied the searcher’s intent and will lower the authority accordingly.

How long will it take to see the effects of SEO?

There is no straight answer to this question. SEO is a long run, a test of endurance, discipline, and consistency. The strategy undoubtfully works, but the time frame of concrete results is a matter of dispute as it depends on many factors.

PageRank is a complex algorithm that uses several points to evaluate the website’s importance. Google’s “brain” is responsible for reading all the site metrics and deciding how to rank accordingly. Although it is not visible to the public anymore, it’s still very much operational. Every SEO measure and optimization addresses PageRank to fulfill its standards. However, the most crucial element examined by PageRank is the quality and quantity of the links leading to a website.

What Is domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric for forecasting how frequently a domain will appear on search engine results pages. It is possible to examine the DA to understand how visitors view a specific website. It uses a score between 1 and 100, evaluating through 40 factors a potential search engine performance. The sheer complexity of the DA assessment makes it hard to define what a good or bad score is, but one thing is sure a website must have a better score than the competition to outperform.

What exactly does SEO mean?

Enhancing or improving a website according to search engine requirements to increase exposure and organic traffic is a process known as SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is one of the best cost-effective digital marketing strategies for gathering organic leads that consists of multiple operations established to improve the website’s ranking.

What are SEO components?

SEO is a multidimensional discipline demanding all pieces of the puzzle to work in perfect symbiosis to produce results.

What does On-page SEO or On-site SEO incorporate?

On-page SEO is the process that covers everything written or added onto the site pages along with the overall user experience. Google is continuously developing its ability to comprehend what is happening on a website page. On-page SEO aims to optimize website pages, allowing Google’s algorithm to scan through efficiently and understand the content. The algorithm will assess titles, graphics, relevant content, Internal and External hyperlinks, the HTML code, data structure, and how easy it is to navigate.

Maybe it is better to ask who doesn’t need SEO. Perhaps a tiny local grocery store with fruits and vegetables supplying a small part of a block is a perfect example. Everybody else needs SEO. Since buyer and consumer habits have changed immensely in the last 20 years with the internet evolution, the providers of services/products have no other option but to keep up with them. As a result, the internet has become a powerful, affordable, and necessary tool for advertising. It is so powerful, with limitless possibilities, that a company can have the same amount of exposure as a brand in a Super Bowl commercial, spending incomparably less money. These benefits have created massive competition among businesses, and everyone is trying to get their share. As a result of that number of competing offers, search engines have raised the bar by constantly adding new standards to allow only the most quality websites to rank well. The standards have become so complex that they are responsible for creating an entirely new niche of SEO-providing services. So nowadays, entrepreneurs with serious intentions and success on their minds have the task of finding a trustworthy, reliable, and competent SEO agency. Otherwise, it risks entangling in a vast subject, thus spending less time working on a primary goal, business development.

Most Important SEO Techniques for Higher Ranking

09. Dec. 2022 | Written by Daniela C.

Despite frequent algorithm changes, certain factors will always remain important for Google when ranking. With some creativity and the right SEO techniques, you may find your site on the first page of Google. In just five minutes of reading, you will find essential SEO techniques contributing to a better search ranking. So let’s start.

Optimize your site for Google RankBrain

Google’s RankBrain algorithm changed the game. The first machine learning algorithm that measures how you interact with results on the first page. The critical factor for RankBrain is user experience, i.e., the relationship between clicks and the amount of time users spend on the site. Of course, keywords and other traditional signals are still important. But RankBrain quickly takes over.

One of the best SEO techniques to optimize your site for Google RankBrain is to improve your organic click-through rate (CTR). If plenty of people click on your site, the volume of visitors signalizes Google that people like to see that result. Naturally, Google will move it to the top of the page to be found easier. Check Google Adwords ads for specific keywords to determine what people prefer to click.

You’ll likely get more clicks when you get the terms and include them in your meta tags. And that’s just one part; the other is to keep visitors on your site. More precisely, to improve the rate of leaving the home page and the so-called “dwell time.” If users leave your site after a few seconds, that signal tells Google that people don’t like your content. That’s why you must create well-organized, relevant, and unique content.

Create content that will go viral

It’s no secret that the quality of content and blogs significantly impact overall SEO power and represent one of the essential SEO techniques. Creating high-quality content increases the time users stay on the site and reduces the abandonment rate. In digital marketing, there is a saying: “Content is King, Link Building is Queen.”

All the effort you put into building links can only be effective if the content on your site is good. Users like to find good content, and search engines are just intermediaries who try to find the best answers to the questions asked in the fields for search. However, to improve your rankings, good content should be created so that it also becomes viral, resonates with your audience, and makes a lasting impact on people. Going viral will help you earn natural links, which are crucial to link building.

The content will become viral if original, targets emotions, uses current news, tells a story, is interactive, and if the timing is good. A call to action is an indispensable item in any content. Before that, as soon as you start with the technical details of optimization, create quality content that will attract and retain the audience, answer their most frequent questions, and educate and entertain visitors. And then make it viral.

Do a content update

After writing and publishing a text, many think they have done all the work. The work begins here. No matter how well you write the text, it is unrealistic to expect it to immediately bring a high position on Google for a strong keyword. It requires clicks along with reviews.

Blog posts and similar content that “collect dust” on the site can slow you down in progress, of course, if the optimization is not in place. To improve your ranking, you can do a content update in that case. Consecrate every few months pay attention to your old content, and optimize it according to current SEO rules.

Add external links to authoritative sites, reorganize the content, and add a new title and description. This way, the text is opened again, viewed, commented on, and Google sees something wrong, recognizes the text as attractive, and gives it a better ranking result. And don’t worry: While posting a content update on the same URL, you don’t need to worry about duplicate content.

Get Authority Backlinks

You might be thinking: Backlinks again? Like it or not, backlinks continue to be one of the most important factors of high ranking. Only trust those who say they can achieve success with their site with backlinks. You must have noticed that people often base their opinions on other people’s views. Before we book accommodation or watch a movie, we also look at other people’s ratings and comments.

Google operates similarly – as one of the most critical ranking factors considers backlinks, i.e., recommendations to other sites about the value of certain content. There are different SEO techniques to get backlinks. One possible way is to get them from your Visual Assets. When you copy the URL of your Visual Assets into the browser and click “Search by image,” you will get a list of sites that used your images or infographics but did not link to you.

Send them an email and politely ask them to add a link to the original source (you). The following SEO technique to get backlinks is digital PR. Digital PR encompasses everything we get by combining traditional PR with content marketing, social media, and search. Digital PR bypasses media and directly addresses the target audience on the Internet. You can:

You write press releases
You create content based on data
Use reactive PR (become a source).

Also, a tool like Google Alert is always a good idea to get backlinks. With this tool, you can find sites that have mentioned you and then ask them to place a clickable link instead of the so-called citations.

Clean up toxic links

It is a mistake to think that it is enough to have a lot of backlinks for a good ranking without paying much attention to their quality. Only some links are good. Other toxic links can negatively affect ranking, organic traffic, and reputation. These links can come from:

Irrelevant and inactive sites;
From the so-called content farms, that is, sites that exist without any substance, just for link building.
In the framework of over-optimized texts (because that is also penalized) from sites that “spam” and have explicit content
From bad web directories
Or if you use automated programs or services for building backlinks.

Google treats all links that aim to manipulate search rankings as a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If Google estimates that a link on your site is manipulative, it can penalize you by not showing the search results of a page of your site or the entire site.

Problematic backlinks sometimes are not created on purpose. That’s why you should check the sites with backlinks leading to your site. Something might need to be fixed if you see many links coming from countries where you don’t do business. Or if you get a lot of backlinks from domains from an industry that has nothing to do with you.

There are several ways to check your backlinks; the simplest is using some SEO tool. To better understand if the problem exists, you can also check this problem through Google Analytics.

Make your site fast

It is hard to imagine site optimization without considering the page loading speed factor. As mobile devices take precedence in internet usage, upload speed pages are especially significant on mobile devices. Site loading speed affects user satisfaction, site usability, and conversion. In addition to affecting the overall user experience and reducing the page bouncing rate, the site’s speed enables better crawling by Google bots. Many factors impact site speed, such as uploading large files, unoptimized content, and insufficiently fast server. To improve site speed, pay attention to the following:

Enable site file compression to reduce the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Reduce and limit the number of redirects because they slow down the site.
Use a CDN (a network of servers distributed in different geographical locations).
Optimize time to the first byte

You can always use Google’s free Google Page Speed Insights tool that evaluates site speed and provides valuable information on what needs to be improved.

Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the best SEO tools on the market. Compared to others, the advantage of this tool is that the data you get from Google Search Console comes directly from Google. You can quickly attract more traffic by using the information within your account. In just a few clicks, you will find out which words bring people to your site, the number of people who see and click on your text, and your overall position for each keyword.

And if you “dig” deep, you will find many keywords you didn’t even know about serving your rank. You may also notice a lot of occurrences for a particular keyword but only a few clicks, which means you have a high potential to get traffic for that term which means you need to boost your ranking for that keyword. Add more content (as long as possible content, the better the ranking), include visual multimedia, and build links.

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

If you create your website on the WordPress platform, you should optimize it for Google Core Web Vitals. In 2021, Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor and Google’s latest answer to how to rank sites on its search engine by structural quality.

Core Web Vitals is a set of performance indicators and user experience. More precisely, it represents three specific performance-related indicators of your site and user experience. It is important to note that Core Web Vital deals with the way of page loading, not the total load time. These are three specific metrics currently used:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the time it takes to render the main content of your page loads (not the entire content, but only the main content that visitors see first). Ideally, your LCP should be less than 2.5 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID) – the time it takes for your page to render interactive. Your FID should be less than 100ms.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures visual stability, that is, how much your content visually scrolls as it loads. Your CLS should be below 0.1.

If you want to test your site according to Core Web Vitals quickly, you can use Google testing tools PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console. While PageSpeed Insights tests only one URL, Google Search Console will find problems on your entire site.

Written by Daniela C.