SEO may seem complex at first glance. However, it is actually a discipline that everyone can understand. It involves editorial, graphic, technical and sometimes even human relations skills
In other words, SEO is understandable by everyone as long as they are interested in it.
Today, we are going to see 12 practices that anyone can use to increase your organic traffic
This article was written by Antoine Veyrieres, manager of the Monkey agency. You can find his new articles every Monday morning on his SEO blog
1 – Have a UX / UI Friendly site
The first tip is to work on the design and user experience of your site. This may seem “logical”, but it is essential to maximize the SEO actions listed in the rest of this article
Here are some tips to make a site as pleasant as possible:
- In web design: Less Is More. You should not try to integrate all sorts of colors, fonts or animations on the pages of a website. The simpler it is, the more fluid the navigation will be;
- Two colors, one primary and one secondary, are already quite sufficient at first.
A good design and a good user experience are the first bricks of a successful SEO strategy in the long term. It is a shame to start working on your SEO until these two aspects are perfectly tied together
A good UX and UI design will multiply the impact of SEO optimizations in the long term. So it’s a good idea to be patient and fix these issues before embarking on an SEO strategy
2 – Improve the loading time on mobile
The pages of a website are scanned by Googlebot for mobile. The faster the site loads, the easier it is for the Googlebot to navigate. To improve the loading time of your site on mobile it is important to work on :
- The weight of images ;
- The Javascript ;
- The CSS ;
- Hosting ;
- DNS ;
- Animations
The loading time, also called velocity of a website, has a huge impact on its referencing. Google has pushed a few years ago the AMP format, which allows to remove, on this version, all css and javascript resources
The goal is to allow anyone to visit a web page from anywhere, like in public transport for example. Google’s strategy for its search engine is focused on mobile navigation
However, a mobile user will not necessarily have access to WIFI. Although 4G, soon 5G are rather well democratized in big cities, creating a fast site for mobile will allow the user to access it from anywhere
3 – Incorporate on-page SEO tags
There are HTML tags that tell Google on which keywords a page should be positioned. It is therefore essential to use them without moderation by incorporating the target query in each of them:
- Meta Title tags ;
- Meta Description tags ;
- Hn tags ;
- Strong tags (to a lesser extent).
SEO tags are of utmost importance. Without SEO tags, it will be very complicated for a site to be referenced on relevant keywords
By using these tags, the developer makes Google’s job easier. And when you know the number of pages that the Google robot has to explore every day, it is understandable that the smallest gift that is given to him will have a great impact on the natural referencing of the website concerned
4 – Use the right keywords
In addition to the HMTL tags, a page must be semantically optimized. That is to say, it must respond as well as possible to the search intention of the users. To do this, nothing better than to browse the SERPs and sites positioned on the targeted words
It will be necessary to identify :
- The semantic field of the target query;
- The recurring questions related to the target query.
Google’s referencing algorithm is opaque and confidential. It is important for a search engine not to reveal how it works to avoid being manipulated by SEOs
However, Google uses hundreds of different factors to reference pages on its search engine. And among them, it is obvious that the semantic richness of a page has its importance
5 – Make guest articles
Since its creation, the Google algorithm uses a fundamental principle: netlinking. That is to say that each link coming from another site and pointing to your site will transfer SEO juice to you and will therefore have the impact of improving the referencing
Guest articles are in a way the most high-end way to collect backlinks. They allow you to control your netlinking strategy from A to Z. It is possible by using guest articles to find ultra relevant sites
Let’s take the example of this article, here the SEO agency Monkey published a guest article on the blog of Twaino. It would have been impossible for them to find such relevant backlinks through a link selling platform.
6 – Publish regularly
Publishing regularly will have several advantages for a website or a blog. Firstly, it will logically allow to position more pages and therefore to seek more and more keywords on which to rank
On the other hand, this strategy linked to a good internal linkage will improve the referencing of other existing pages. Finally, publishing regularly will force Google to visit your site more often, and thus facilitate its indexing
To have a high and regular publication rate, it is necessary to surround yourself with excellent web writers who are passionate about the theme of the site in question. Indeed, it takes a day to write an article of 2000 words, and half a day more for its optimization and integration
7 – Optimize internal linking
Internal linking has the double benefit of transferring SEO juice between pages (and therefore push them together), while facilitating their indexation. Indeed, Googlebot will be more likely to explore a well meshed site
It is important that internal linking is done according to semantics, i.e. categorizing the pages of a site to link them together.
Moreover, internal linking should not only be seen as a tool to facilitate the exploration of your site by the Google robot. A good internal mesh must allow your visitor to wander through your site
That’s why you should not see internal linking only through hyperlinks. A good internal mesh involves the Call To Action (CTA) of the pages of a website. Google knows this and gives a lot of importance to a link coming from a call to action button
8 – Set up an SEO reporting tool
The goal here is to set goals to achieve. An SEO reporting tool should allow a user to see the progress from month to month on target queries. The reporting also allows to follow the general progression of organic traffic (impressions, clicks, click-through rate, conversions)
Properly used, this tool should allow the webmaster to adjust the vision regularly and adopt a surgical SEO strategy to maximize organic results. SEO reporting can be done on many tools, the main ones being Google Data Studio or SEMrush
A monthly SEO reporting is therefore essential to achieve its goals in SEO. Without this tool, the SEO will go in all directions and will end up abandoning his course
9 – Audit your site regularly
In addition to reporting, auditing a site regularly will allow to follow the evolution on operational KPIs
- content ;
- technical ;
- netlinking ;
- and possibly social networks
A website is alive, its loading time will tend to deteriorate with time, as well as more global errors that will tend to multiply. It is therefore good practice to keep an eye on this
A regular audit, let’s say monthly, should obviously represent much less work than a complete audit done during a so-called one shot service
Here, it is necessary to use a replicable model that allows to follow the evolution of the technique, the content and the popularity of a website. Not to be confused with an audit done at the launch or start of an SEO strategy
10 – Focus on quality rather than quantity
In the last 3 years, Google has really increased its requirements. One developer even indicated the use of artificial intelligence before the indexing crawl, which by definition involves a second layer of indexing by an AI
In concrete terms, this means that Google will no longer try to index all the sites on its search engine. Only the most relevant and the most qualitative will still have their place. So always give priority to quality over quantity
This part is perhaps the most important of all this article. Quality will always take precedence over quantity in the time to come. And since SEO is a long term job, it must allow the sites benefiting from it to enjoy a long term return on investment
To improve the quality of your pages, it is necessary to understand that you should not stop at simple content writing. We call SXO the intersection between an SEO strategy and a UX strategy
In other words, quality will involve several skills
- Of design
- Web development
- Of web writing
- And of course SEO
11 – Communicate on social networks
There is a debate that has been tearing SEOs apart for many years
“Will publishing on social networks have an impact on natural referencing?”
In fact, links from social networks are not taken into account by Google being nofollow. They do not send SEO juice directly to the pages of the targeted site
However, it is certain that making a brand known by word of mouth helps to facilitate its referencing. And what better way to spread word of mouth than through social networks?
SEO is often compared to a Juice, which flows from page to page and from site to site thanks to backlinks and internal linking. It is necessary to understand that the Google robot is designed to imitate the navigation of real website visitors
So what better way to send a maximum of visitors to a site to facilitate the work of the GoogleBot. In the long term, a social media strategy will have the impact of sending data to Google, which will facilitate its work on a website.
12 – Invest in the long term
“How long does SEO take?”
The most asked question by SEOs themselves. The answer is simple: a long time
And it is precisely because SEO is so long that it is the channel with the highest return on investment
If you’re on the first page tomorrow, you’ll be there for a long time. The key to a successful SEO strategy is patience. Don’t judge your results, but rather the general trend
Moreover, the age of a domain name is an important parameter in the consideration of the referencing of a domain by Google
In summary
To conclude this article, I would like to focus on quality. The days of black hat SEO manipulating Google’s algorithm are over. Among these 12 tips, there is not one that invites this kind of practice
To get listed, you need to provide maximum value to your visitors while making it as pleasant as possible to navigate the site. In the same way, making it easier for Google’s indexing robot to navigate your pages has nothing to do with any manipulation of the algorithm. It simply makes it easier for the Googlebot to explore your site.
