Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the backbone of any digital marketing campaign. Where other techniques look too expensive and only generate business as long as you keep pumping your cash into them, SEO is a long-term plan that provides organic traffic to business websites. However, expecting your SEO plan to last a short while is an as bigger mistake as not having an SEO plan in place at all.

Yet, when done right, an SEO campaign can bring great joys to any business website. Also, some SEO tasks don’t require as much effort as others. Where link-building is a truly on-going activity, internal linking and a few others yield faster results.

When you know your way around basic SEO techniques, these can be just as efficient as any others generating top results. Here are some SEO winner techniques that are also very easy to perform and yet deliver less-ordinary results when done right:

1: Improve Content Quality

Probably the biggest single thing that gets discussed the most in our SEO community is content quality. Some have even argued all you need to do to rank your site is to improve content quality. While this belief might yet be a little shady in some situations, yet, content quality is something that can simply not be compromised on.

Simply put, modern optimization requires content to be written for readers that are humans and not only for crawlers that are Google’s authentical tools. If you have some content that is already on Google’s radar and the URL has a history, you are much better off improving its quality than starting over.

Some important factors to keep in mind are:

• Improve readability of your content by editing it suitably. This should boost user engagement making it much more comprehensive as well.
• Use of relevant media such as images, videos and PDFs is always a great practice improving content quality for readers.
• When you have a lot of research and data, including original statistics, case studies and references works great.

You should be targeting content that you already rank for in order to get quick wins here. Content that ranks very highly should not be touched on either as you don’t want to fix what is not broke. Positions from 5 to 30 are perfect to improve content quality for.

Potential search volume and also relevance of data should also impact your quality improvement. Comparing URLs to competitors who outrank you is a good practice as well. Some of these improvements should or can include:

Length of Content

Word count matters and there are no two ways about it. No matter what you have been told, lengthy content is always comprehensive unless your pages are about products or services that are most self-explanatory in the world.

Content Depth

Generally, pages with comprehensive content almost always outranks pages without it across all industries. This puts content length in question for wasteful content. In other words, you have to get lengthy content that is also meaningful and comprehensive.

Your content should not only answer the original query from the reader but also most of the related queries at the same time. You are better of thinking about related topics to the originally asked questions from user intent with your content. These can include:

• FAQs (frequently asked questions)
• Related definitions
• Proper explanation of a process on relevant sites
• Summary of relevant laws and regulations
• Case studies and statistical data
• Technical specifications or customer reviews

Content Readability

When improving content quality, you should also consider how well is it written. How readable is it for visitors?

A proper analysis done by people with adequate knowledge about your content can only reveal the true readability of your content. There are also tools that help you determine readability, including:

• Yoast for WordPress provides readability score while editing content
• SEMrush allows for a Chrome add-on that integrated with Google Docs and also offers readability test within their platform
• Many other tools, apps and plugins allow for readability test and are often reliable

Readability might not affect SEO ranking directly but affects the amount of time readers might spend on your page.

Different Forms of Media in Content

Does you content have useful images, videos or audio flies? If not, you should add them too. This is a direct concern with readability and will make readers much likely to spend more time on your website and pages.

Images and videos can help readers understand your content much quicker and better encouraging them to spend more time on your site improving the ranking score. Overall user experience gets improved with useful media in content. Media can also contain information that is not included in the text on your pages.

2: Skim Down Low Quality or Outdated Content

Almost as important as improving the quality of your content is to cut short the low-quality content or one that is outdated. Although all content should’ve taken at least some effort, there would almost certainly be some that can still be rubbish.

While some people might hesitate a bit while getting rid of any of their content, it can always yield good results when you remove low quality or outdated content. It is easy to think that content cannot do any harm, even low quality or outdated one and should be left on its own. Google has always reminded SEOs otherwise.

Low quality or outdated content almost always negatively affects your ranking credit score and also traffic as a result of it.

How You Know Which Content to Skim Down

This is also something that is easier said then done. You will eventually have to go through all your pages manually. A quick fix is to use software like Screaming Frog to crawl your website and have a list of URLs generated. This might not help speed up the process but will certainly ensure you don’t miss out on any.

Any content that you can find low in quality or too old and outdated can be skimmed and cropped in quantity. You don’t have to remove all of it. Simply reduce its length and also try to improve quality of the remaining.

3: Updating Internal Links Is a Must

We can talk about content quality and many other factors all day but they might all get un-noticed if you do not have your website internally linked. Internal linking is in fact a powerful and also very easy and compact SEO tool that gives your website a shape that you want and Google expects.

A powerful Internal Linking tactic is to have them pointing towards pages that you wish to rank on your website. These can be the main product or service pages that are also your hottest running ones in the market. However, any internally links placed anywhere on your website should look generic and organic with relevant content containing them. These should also be direct links to have most effect in terms of SEO points.

More Content Pages You Have, More Internal Linking You Need

Usually, websites with many content pages need extra efforts on their internal linking. Even if they have a blog section, every blog post should have links pointing to 4-5 main category pages. This not only creates a virtual map of your website in the eyes of Google but also takes lower ranking pages upwards in ranking points as well.

If you have a website that gets frequent content updates, publishes and/or deletions, surely your focus should be on Internal Linking. SEMrush is a great tool that can identify any redirect chains within your website. It should be able to crawl your website and identify places where you need internal liking done all across your website.

Automating the task of managing these Internal Links is a great way to save time and effort and is very efficient as well especially in WordPress websites. Many good quality plugins can enable you to specify certain words or phrases that will automatically be converted into links for specified URLs. This way, whether your website is a few pages based or hundreds of pages based (some even have pages in thousands believe it or not), it should be easy to create, edit and delete links across the whole website.

4: Focus On Improving Page Load Speeds

Another important ranking factor in more than one ways is page load speeds for your website and various pages. Website owners often overlook this and end up with very small number of users spending more time on their site and pages.

Quite simply, longer a webpage takes to load, fewer leads and sales chances it is likely to generate. Slower websites also tend to no rank as well as faster websites as Google gives great attention to bounce rates while ranking pages and sites.

Most websites are in fact painfully slow and fortunately, this factor is very easy to improve on. You will need moderate expertise when improving page speeds and will also need to look at more than one factors:

Get Rid of Cheap and Futile Web Hosting

The first thing you need to focus on is to change any cheap web hosting if you have any. Cheaper hosting tends to oversell their services meaning your website will be crammed onto a server that has too much load on it as well.

Their servers often also lack in horsepower slowing page load speeds for visitors driving them away sooner than you’d want.

Reducing the HTTP Calls

A separate HTTP request is required for each part of your website such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Image, Video etc. However, fewer HTTP requests generally points to a faster loading website. This is somewhat of a paradox that is to be fixed.

You should begin by removing any unnecessary plugins and then having your JavaScript and CSS merged into a single file. Minimizing the number of image files by using CSS that will create your most wanted design effect and/or by utilizing sprites to merge multiple frequently used images is a good practice as well.

Optimizing Media Files Helps with Load Speeds

Then you should also consider optimizing media files as well. The ideal media format for images or videos always suits best with their best suited sizes as well. Compressing media files with even some free tools can do the job for you. WordPress plugins also help with file compression without distorting their quality at all.

5: Implementing Your Schema Markup

Although there might not be any direct evidence for the impact of Schema Markup on ranking in Google, it is still critical according to many SEO experts. It can significantly increase your website’s visibility in search results that provides higher click-through rates.

If your website doesn’t have schema at all, you have a tremendous load of opportunity. Implementing schema markup is also much easier than one would think. When done right, your website will be able to appear much better in search results enticing searchers to click it.

This technical talk can be a bit over the top for the un-initiated. www.seo.ae is a Search Engine Optimization service provider based in Dubai offering services to all of UAE. You can now get affordable rates and have your websites optimized to top results. Our experts provide all these services and many more bringing sure results in quickest time possible. Email us or talk to us and we will provide you digital marketing service that you have always been wanting for your business website.