5 Ways to Increase Your SEO Without Losing Value to Your Readers

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Writer in Web Development

Optimization is the key to gaining more organic traffic through the search engines, but many website owners have a hard time balancing readers and optimization. You can add many keywords and fret over keyword density, but that might make your content look rigid and unappealing. You can write only for readers and forget about SEO, but that can hurt your search engine rankings. These five optimization strategies will show you how to improve your SEO without reducing the quality of your content.

On-Page Optimization

Every website owner worries about keyword density and usage, but there are many other on-page elements that you should tweak and work with to improve your rankings.

Are your images optimized? Many people are using image search engines to find websites. If your images are optimized, then you might capture many new visitors. Use a good title for the image, add a description and alternative description and make sure the image is small enough so that your website loads quickly.

You need to pay attention to your HTML and meta information. Are your titles and meta descriptions optimized? Google is now using the meta description as your search engine listing. A bad description can keep people from clicking on your link. A good title can entice readers to enter your website.

Your URL should also be optimized. Most blogging engines create illegible URLs that are just a random combination of letters and numbers. This hurts your SEO because the search engine spiders don’t know how to interpret this information. It’s much better to customize the URL so that it mimics the title of your article or post. This will make your website more relevant when someone searches for a term that you are targeting.

More Posts

Try posting more frequently to improve your SEO. If you are running the website by yourself, then this might be difficult without creating some low-quality posts. Consider outsourcing some of your content needs to professional writers so that you can focus on improving your SEO and creating good posts when you are writing.

There are several good reasons for having more posts. The first is that the search engines prefer to rank active websites that are consistently updating their content. Websites that are active have their pages indexed faster and they tend to have higher rankings if the content is good.

Another reason for making more posts is that you can target more keywords. If you are properly writing your articles, then each one should target at least one keyword. Posting just three times a week means that you are only target three new keywords. Doubling your number of posts allows you to target additional terms so that you can capture more traffic.

Just make sure that all of the content you post is good. You can sabotage your efforts if you post bad articles.

Better Link Building

You need to build links to improve your marketing. This can only be done by posting good articles, comments and guest posts on other websites. Most website owners forget that link building should also involve high-quality content for the best effect.

For example, you see two blog comments on a similar subject. One comment is poorly writen and was obviously made very quickly so that the user could post a link. The other comment is lengthy, informative and shows that the user is an authority on the subject. Which link would you click?

While you should definitely focus on creating good posts on your own website, you should also make good comments and articles when you are building links. You can build more links with fast and sloppy articles, but this isn’t really going to help you.

Treat all of your link building content the same as the articles on your website. This is the best way to improve your SEO and traffic from outside sources.

Natural LSI Keywords

Don’t just focus on incorporating keywords into your posts. You should also think about adding LSI keywords to supplement the main word or phrase that you are targeting. Using LSI terms can improve your SEO because it will make it easier for search engine spiders to understand exactly what your website is about.

For example, you are targeting a generic keyword like “hats.” What type of hats are you writing about? If you use LSI terms like “tuxedo,” “gentlemen” and “formal,” then the search engine spiders will assume that you are talking about top hats. If you instead of LSI terms like, “baseball,” “sports” and “teams,” then the search engine spiders will think you are talking about a sports hat.

While your keyword terms will obviously be more specific than the example above, the truth is that adding LSI terms naturally within your article makes it much stronger. It also makes the article look better and more descriptive to readers.

Update Old Posts

The last method of improving your SEO while maintaining quality is to update your old articles and posts. While many website owners know about this, there are few that are using this strategy. Updating your old posts allows you to add new information that wasn’t known or recognized when you wrote the article. It also shows the search engine spiders that you are improving your website on a deeper level.

Google has been urging website owners to curate and change their existing content so that it better conforms to current SEO standards. Just editing some articles and adding new information can boost your rank significantly. You should also tell readers about these changes so that they will visit the updated posts.

The best way of doing this is to consistently work on a few articles a week. This allows you to come up with new content without rushing yourself, and this pace ensures that you can keep doing business without solely focusing on old content.

Conclusion

SEO has changed in the last few years and keeping ahead of your competition is harder than ever. While many website owners are only focusing on SEO and sacrificing the quality of their writing, these strategies will allow you to improve your organic traffic while making your readers happy. If you can’t do all of this by yourself, then consider outsourcing some of the work to make things a little easier.