Although the SEO landscape is constantly evolving, it is still fundamentally all about improving organic traffic to generate more sales. It is easy to spend more time increasing the number and quality of backlinks and to neglect improvements to the technical aspects of our websites. However, by making certain on-site SEO changes to your site you are putting yourself in a much better position to acquire organic traffic.
This article will outline four very useful technical SEO hacks that can help you gain more inbound organic traffic.
1. Leverage Internal Links
Internal linking is still one of the best SEO tactics to use. Essentially an internal link connects one page of a site to a different page on the same website. When done correctly internal linking will help pass link juice much more efficiently across the inner pages of a website.
How can you improver internal linking?
- Create lots of authoritative, actionable, and high-quality content. Having more content available will allow you to easily create a lot of internal links.
- Don’t always link to the home page. Instead, link out to deeper pages that otherwise have fewer links. The more internal links you have to your important pages, the better chances you will have to get them ranked higher up in the search results.
- Follow Wikipedia if you are looking for an inspiration for relevant internal links. Contextual internal linking is far better than linking done at the bottom of the content.
- Use relevant, natural, and do-follow links. Unnatural links that are not beneficial to the users but created for the sole purpose of internal linking will have a reduced CTR and time on page thereby reducing the overall importance of the website.
2. Optimise Your Website for Mobile Web Crawling
Google has now moved to a mobile first index. When carrying out a technical site audit, it is important to review whether Google Smartphone crawler is able to properly index the contents of the site.
How do you get a mobile friendly site?
- Perform a mobile friendly test and use the “Fetch as Google” option from Google to check for any issues.
- Look at the mobile usability report under the search console to check any mobile usability issues detected over time.
- Use Tools like Screaming Frog to simulate mobile bot search behaviour and make sure that the mobile pages are rendered properly.
- Conduct a log analysis and block spam bots so as to allow easy access to search engine crawlers.
3. Use HTML Tables for Direct Answer Queries
Google likes to give direct answers to the searchers. If your web pages provide direct answers to the commonly searched user questions related to your niche then you have an excellent chance of diverting good traffic from the direct answer box results returned by Google.
4. Increase the Word Count of Blog Pages to 2500-3000 Words
If your aim is to rank for an informative search query like “how to improve WordPress SEO”, then will need to have at least 2500 words of content in your page.
Snapagency did a survey and learned that blog posts having a word count of 2500 words or more received the maximum social shares. Hence, the best blog post length that you should always aim for is 2500 words.
With these four technical SEO hacks your website will gradually begin to see increases in organic traffic!
Guest article written by: Jamie FitzHenry is the founder of Grizzly, a Bristol digital agency.