SEO stands for search engine optimization. Advanced tips, and techniques of SEO are not hard to learn. It depends on your passion for it. If willing to work as an individual then you must choose SEO as a career. Its biggest asset is that it gives the freedom to work from anywhere. While searching it in google, you will notice that thousands of SEO experts are working as a freelancer.
Search optimization is an essential marketing strategy for getting attention, grow business, and to drive website traffic. This essential strategy, can become hard to manage if you don’t know how to compare SEM, and SEO. These are the two major categories within a search engine. They both sound the same, but the approaches are different to search optimization. For building an effective strategy for improving the visibility in search let’s understand the difference between these two terms.
Table of Contents
SEO- Search Engine Optimization is part of search marketing. To gain visibility in research engine result pages it uses Organic tactics. As the result, it is valuable, and authoritative they use a variety of tactics that prompt search engines to show their content near the top of search engine result pages.
SEO includes hundreds of tactics, and is often grouped into three categories.
- On-page SEO- Optimizes each page of a website to target a specific keyword, and appeal to search engines.
- Technical SEO- Optimizes non-content elements of a website to improve its foundation, and back-end structure.
- Off-page SEO- builds reputation, and authority of a website by connecting it to other high-quality websites.
SEM- Search Engine Marketing is considered the part of search marketing that uses paid tactics to gain visibility on the search engine results page. A paid SEM strategy includes both the activities.
- Involved with setting up, and optimizing adds
- Setting a budget that pays for the placement of adds
The strategy is often referred to as pay per click, or paid search marketing.
10 Advanced SEO Techniques
When you operate in a competitive sector, knowing only about SEO basics is not sufficient. Here are some advanced SEO techniques that help to get your organic research strategy to drive business growth, increase traffic, and secure more conversions for taking your strategy to the next level.
1. Update existing content– Why go for new if your websites offer the opportunity to improve, and upgrade existing content? Publishing new content is not an easy task. It requires time to rank, and drive associated traffic.
If you improve your existing content, you can enjoy quick wins both in terms of ranking gains, and traffic.
- Current trend, and facts- Out of date content becomes less relevant to the search query. Updating the current trend, and facts can help you regain lost ground. For instance- Updating 2020 to 2021, outdated facts with the newest versions.
- Performance data
2. Build out topic clusters- Topic clusters are centered around a single topic, and offers multiple internal linking opportunities to keep readers on your site.
If your site isn’t already structured around topic clusters, you must consider the factor for working on. They are effective SEO tactics that help you to create group pieces of content that showcase expertise, and topical relevance.
3. Run a content audit for removing under performing content- Every page on the website is designed for some specific purpose. If it is serving the purpose then you can get rid of (or improve), and vice versa.
To discover performing, and under performing pages, running a content audit will be a great tactic for the purpose. This task is performed once, or twice per year by various sites depending on the quantity of the published content.
4. Find, and fix keyword cannibalization issues- Do you think, when two, or more pages on your website are optimized for the same keyword can be termed as cannibalization issues? Not, such issues are about intent.
They happen when two, or more pages target the same intent. Some signs that highlight such issues are-
- Your ranking keeps fluctuating
- Wrong URL ranks for a page
- You are struggling to increase keyword’s ranking position
Different ways to fix them once noticed-
- Re-optimize pages
- Merging, and consolidating pages
- Reworking internal linking structures
5. Master internal linking- You can refer to it as the most underrated SEO Techniques. These tactics should be used when you launch new content to link to it internally.
6. Analyze your log files- Many SEOs have never taken the time to analyze their log files. But this is essential as it is an advanced level tactic. Analyzing log files can:
- Show you where, and how much budget were wasted
- Helps to identify the cause of crawl errors
- Find pages that aren’t being crawled frequently
In brief, analyzing log files offers a way to understand how search engines are crawling your site, and the issues they faced.
7. Original images are to be preferred for content- You know well that high-quality image make your content better. Nevertheless, that can indirectly help with ranking. So, what kind of images can you use for content? As per experts, duplicate images can hurt your page’s ranking.
8. Create a comment section on your blog- Comments play a big role in SEO. It can help your SEO for three reasons-
- This is a direct ranking factor
- They can provide more stuff to users
- A comment section is content that googles indexes, crawls, and ranks.
9. Add content features to your page- By content features, you are recommended to add the things that make your content useful, and compelling. It can benefit you directly, and indirectly. Content features include-
- Calculator
- Pros, and cons list
- Summary
- Feature breakdown
- Comparison chart
- Quote boxes
10. Optimize for google discover- Google discovers stands as a new version of the social media news feed. However, instead of featuring the post of whom you follow, google shows you high-quality content that they think that you will like.
5 Advanced SEO Techniques to boost up your ranking
- Go back to shorter meta description- Yes you heard it right, as we are talking about advanced tips. Say goodbye to metadata with more than 160 words. Google has come back to its previous limits. Your meta description should be short, but packed with the right information.
- Use keywords that matter- Among all the advanced tips, and techniques keyword selection is important than all. Targeting keywords matter as your ROI depends on it.
- Internal linking is a must- Creating a better structure for your blog is necessary possible by internal linking. Have you noticed that while reading an interesting blog a link is shown for reading another blog? Yes, that is known as internal linking.
- Work on speed loading- Websites can’t be taken just as a source of providing information. They help the visitors find out what they want, and in the minimum time possible.
- Optimize the images- A picture says more than words. Moreover, capable to attract thousands of visitors if correctly optimized. Here is a step-by-step procedure to be followed for the task.
- Do not name them randomly
- Captions are to be preferred as they get more attention from visitors
- Keep the file size light so they can be loaded faster
5 Advanced SEO Techniques to drive organic traffic
- Improve user experience across the entire site- If your website looks outdated, untrustworthy, or is slow to load, potential users are likely to bounce on another result. Here are a few tips you need to follow for improving your user’s experience.
- Make your posts easy to read- For it you are required to follow the formatting tips like- write quality content, shorter paragraphs, mixed sentence length, bullet points, and screenshots.
- Use bucket brigades to keep the flow- Bucket brigade is a series of words that bridges one idea to the next for maintaining a flow. Some examples are here for you.
- Do I have your attention?
- Think about that for a minute
- I know the feelings
- Let’s get started
- Have you wondered why?
- In short
- Use the inverted pyramid style of writing- It means valuable information should be listed at the top, and vice versa.
- Increase website speed- For users, performance elements like site speed means a lot. A big thanks to google that it launched various tools for their welfare. PageSpeed Insights, Test My Site are some instances of the tools.
- Write longer content- Longer content tends to accumulate more backlinks, more traffic, and improved rankings. If writing longer content is not possible at all, in case you can write it by refreshing your old content.
Final takeaways
As we know, SEO is rapidly evolving. Make sure to spend time on the basics, fundamentals, tips and stay on top of technical trends, and their impacts on the things like backlinks, and site speed.
Make the efforts regularly to see a difference in your click-through rates, engagement, and ranking.