Do you want to learn how to rank a website higher on Google? If yes, you have come to the right place and no need to search further ahead.

In this post, I will help you do that by taking you through 15 effective SEO strategies that will help your website take to the next level.

You will also learn

• Research on Keywords
• Voice Search
• Enhancing User Experience
• Writing Quality content

What generally happens is that you are running a website or blog for quite some time.

You publish a unique article on your site regularly, also you are promoting them on various media but still, you are not getting enough traffic to your site.

Sounds familiar?

Well, I have one thing to ask: Have you done proper SEO or search engine optimization for your site?

You are probably wondering.

In short, search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website and blog for both search engines like Google and its users, so that they both can understand what your site depicts and what the site is all about.

As per seotribunal, every day around 5.6 billion searches is made on Google in 2019, which is around 560 crore queries per day (updated). In 2000, this number was 14 billion per day.

Hubspot claims, around 80% of a website’s traffic starts with a search query and that’s why search engine optimization is so important.

Here you will learn about search engine optimization tips that will help you bring your site quite a number of few steps ahead, hopefully on the top of SERPs too. 

Top 15 Tips: How To Rank Higher on Google In 2020

1. Research on Keywords

Researching keywords is the most important factor that helps boost up a site’s ranking and helps you rank higher on Google.

Never jump on writing an article without doing proper keyword research.

I always personally do a proper keyword researching before sitting for writing an article for my blog.

Keyword research helps you understand what kind of phrases or words people are putting in the search bar to search for an item for themselves.

Choosing a keyword that has high search volume and high CPC rate yet has a low competition is ideal for a blog post.

For this task, you should need some good keyword research tools that will make your task easier.

Besides you can always take help from Google Trends to help you know what keywords are trending now on Google, how they performed in the last 5 years, how many searches the keyword gets etc.

2. Create Unique Contents

Content is the king.

Content is one of the three ranking factors Google prioritizes most when you are looking to rank your website higher on Google.

Your visitors come to your site for the quality of the contents you provide them from time to time and not for the gorgeous design of your site.

Uniqueness is another major factor that adds value to your content.

Search engines always prefer high-quality content that is both unique and lengthy in nature.

With the new algorithm update, Google clearly states that the quality of content is a major ranking factor for a website.

Moreover, Google loves to present to its users only those articles that are informative and helpful, authentic and add great value to its users.

Apart from this, Google tends to push those websites up to the top of SERP which has a long description.

A lengthy article normally containing 2000+ words are always preferred by search bots.

So make sure when you sit for writing a post write at least 1000+ words.

If your post is deeply descriptive, stuffed with useful information, words, multimedia, infographics, charts, etc. as well as totally different from others chances are there your site can outdo its competitors quick.

3. Focus on User Experience

Google has tons of ranking factors to increase the ranking of a website.

User experience is one of them. User Experience (in short UX) targets to provide users the best experience while crawling on a website.

That is why UX is a vital point in search engine optimization techniques.

By user experience, it is meant

• Good page speed
• Responsive page layout
• Better internal linking
• Easy navigation
• Clear and easy to understand the content
• Relevant and to the point information
• Etc.

All these are packed into one which is called user experience. So be careful about that.

4. Stress on Voice Search

By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice search, says comScore.

Google Assistant is now dominating over 400 million devices according to Google. And 30% of total searches will be conducted without a screen by 2020.

These statistics are really very striking. In fact, when I came across them I was terribly shocked. That’s natural. And probably you, too, are. But, it is another most important tips to learn when it comes to rank higher on Google.

If you are looking for increasing your website traffic be well prepared to put on voice search.

In the upcoming years, voice search is likely to hit those sites that do not have a colloquial tone of the conversation.

Because when people use voice searching services like Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc. they speak in the conversational tone, not in a direct tone that is short in nature.

So listen to people first and understand the tone of their language. Therefore, use them in your blog posts to make your site voice-search-optimized.
Voice search is one of the fast-growing types of search and every webmaster should be well-informed before it is too late.

You can follow a few strategies to reap the most benefits from voice search, like:

• • Using long-tail keywords. (opens in new window)
  • Implementing FAQs in contents using ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘where’, etc.
  • Using a colloquial tone of the conversation.
  • Understanding your audience’s needs.

5. Build Up Social Networking

Social networking is one of the biggest weapons to grab your target audience. Join platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. for promoting your content there.

The best part of social networking is that there are tons of users who stay active all the time.

That means you get more engagements from them and more quality traffic from these high authority sites.

When you share your content there you get extra exposure for your blog posts.

Side by side you are giving them a chance to come to your site, read your contents and share them with others.

Regular nurturing your social connection helps you develop a good relationship with other users and thus it improves your website SEO in the long run.

As the majority of your website traffic is coming from these high authority social platforms it prompts Google to rank your page up in the SERPs.

In this way, you will start increasing your domain score that is a very good signal for search engine optimization.

6. Make Your Site User-Friendly

It is one of the major factors that contribute to search engine optimization to rank better on search engines including Google.

A user-friendly website is desired by all. A site that is intuitive, neat and clean, and full of relevant information is always loved by search bots.

Thus it becomes easy for them to understand your site better.

Here are some tips that are highly recommended for a user-friendly website:

1. Make your site simple and intuitive in design.
2. Use different tags such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
3. Differentiate the main points with bullets and numbers.
4. Write each paragraph of 3-4 lines.
5. Use navigation bars.
6. Make internal linking to posts highly relevant to other posts.
7. Use infographics where necessary.
8. Add the share button for easy to share.

7. Check Your Page Speed

Checking page loading speed is another vital thing in SEO and rank higher on Google. Google normally prioritizes those sites that load less than 5 seconds at the best.

Using responsive themes, adding few gadgets, attaching a few ads help you boost up your page speed. Use any of these tools to check your current website loading speed:

• • PageSpeed Insight (Google)
  • Pingdom
  • GTmetrics

• Top 20 Responsive Themes To Speed Up Your Website
• Best Cheap WordPress Hosting Providers 2020

8. Follow SEO Blogs and Videos

Following SEO blogs and watching videos is of immense value for improving search engine optimization on Google.

It helps you get an insight into how other SEO experts are writing SEO-optimized blog posts for their blogs and websites.

It might be possible that you already know many of their tips, still, you need to go through every tip to have detailed information on SEO.

Below are some popular SEO blogs to follow:

• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO (Moz)
• Guide to SEO (Search Engine Land)
• Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

If that does not seem enough try these YouTube channels to keep yourself abreast of the latest SEO changes.

• Moz’s Whiteboard Friday
• Google Webmasters

9. Use Long-Tail Keywords

If you are using long-tail keywords in your contents your website will grow rapidly than those with general one/two-word keywords.

Everywhere in today’s world, there is high competition. Still, if you push yourself a step up and work smart better chances are there you will succeed.

A New York study found that long-tail keywords with and without on-page search engine optimization work better in the ranking than single or double word keywords.

There are various benefits that a long tail keyword gives you to boost up SEO in Google:

Help you find a target audience.

• It gives you a higher conversion rate.
• It has low competition.
• Better PPC (pay per click).
• Google likes long-tail keywords that signal to a particular niche.
• Great for highly competitive niches.

For example, suppose you have written a blog post on ‘how to make money from blogging in 2020‘; whereas your competitor wrote on ‘how to make money from blogging in India’.

Naturally, here your competitor will win the race.

And the cause is he used a long tail keyword that signals to a particular region which means he wants target traffic to his website.

10. Optimize Image Properly

Optimization of images is one important thing that plays a good role in search engine optimization techniques.

What is image optimization?

To optimize an image means reducing the file size as low as possible without compromising with image quality.

This helps you load your website faster than before. You can call it simply as image SEO, too.

How to optimize an image?

Here I have shared a few tips to follow to optimize an image:

Name your image text properly. Try to include the main keywords in them.

Don’t forget to add an alt attribute to your image.

Adding an alt attribute that has main keywords in it contributes SEO value to your website and helps your site rank better on Google.

Personally, I use this website for compressing my blog images.

If you are running an e-commerce site with a plethora of images give shots of a particular item from every angle possible.

Choose the right format for image and make it low in size.

This helps a site loads faster. It is one of the ranking factors Google prioritizes most.

11. Include Keywords in URL

Including the main keywords to the URL of a blog post adds great SEO value to your website.

Steer clear of congesting an URL with lots of unnecessary words and prepositions like ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘with’, ‘from’ etc.

For example, you have written a post on ‘How to Make Money Blogging‘. You should create the URL of the post like ‘website.com/make-money-blogging’.

This type of URL is easily sharable and a strong signal for search bots.

12. Optimize Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a 155 characters-rich snippet that has focused keywords so that Google can understand what this page is about before showing it to a visitor.

Optimizing meta description is very crucial for search engine optimization especially for on-page SEO.

So make sure when you’re writing down a blog post you are adding a meta description to it.

13. Monitor Your Backlinks For Better Reputation On Google

Backlinks are like bread and butter to a website. Without backlinks, there is hardly any expectations that the site will rank.

So building quality backlinks is very crucial for search engine optimization.

But what sometimes happens is that your competitors build up thousands of low-quality backlinks from thousands of spammy websites, like directory submission sites and article submission sites.

Probably they do it in order to smash your SERP ranking and ultimately knock you out of Google’s first page.

You have to care about that.

Use Monitor Backlinks to keep strict surveillance of your website. If some suspicious transpires with your site it will let you know immediately through email.

14. Fix Broken Links On Your Website

Broken links are very harmful from SEO perspectives and for this Google tends to bring down a website’s ranking. So you need to fix the broken links first.

What are the broken links? When a page links to such a page that doesn’t exist or has been removed that link is called a broken link.

It normally contains a 404 code error when you try to access that site. Sometimes it can say timeout also.

When search engine bots find a broken link suggesting a 404 error it inevitably lowers the ranking of a site.

If you are using WordPress, use the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin to help you detect easily rotten links or dead links.

You can also use Google webmaster tools to identify and fix this issue. 

This plugin made it all easy for you to unlink or renew links that are corrupted and show a 404 error or timeout error.

15. Focus More on Email Marketing

What is email marketing?

To say simply, it is the process of promoting your elements and products to a number of influential people via sending them emails.

The emails are normally promotional in nature and contain certain links that lead to your products.

The great advantage of email marketing is that you can drive target traffic to your blog and increase the conversion rate as well.

When you send an email of one of your blog contents to an influential blogger chance is there that the person can link his blog to your content in case he finds something useful and demanding in it.

This way you end up getting backlinked from their sites plus your SEO gets improved.

Since your backlink comes from an authoritative site Google is sure to improve your website ranking.

Here is a quick recap of all the points in the form of an infographic:

Which tips do you follow to rank your blog and website higher on Google? Did I miss anything? Do let me know in the comment and I would love to hear your thoughts.