Simple SEO Tips to Get Higher Ranking

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot-spot issue for any online business. By and large, everybody craves for higher Google ranking and puts huge amounts of time and effort to come up on the first page. It's that simple: the more your web pages are Search Engine friendly, the more traffic they get and the higher profit you earn. So here I'm going to list some basic SEO practices that web-marketers (especially newbies) tend to forget.

Optimize Your Sitemap and Try to Increase Backlinks

In simple terms, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs of your entire website. The Sitemaps protocol informs Google about the organization of your site content, thus allowing the search engine to crawl your site more intelligently. So creating an efficient hierarchical sitemap would be the first step towards success. Besides that, do check your site for broken or dead links and keep in mind to optimize internal links with a good anchor text to select important keywords.

That Is How Backlinks Work

Backlinks, or inward links, are the most essential factor that affects a website's ranking. And this all makes sense: the higher the number of reliable backlinks, the higher creditability your website gains. There are some web platforms allowing you to increase your website backlinks to push it up on Google's search results. Sharing is caring, right? So do invest your time in claiming some free backlinks.

Speak Google's Language

Another SEO aspect you must know is that all headings and subheading on your website's pages should be pleasant not only for visitors, but for the search engine as well. Make sure any of such content is provided with the headings tags, if you want Google to recognize it. Here are the most common heading tags:

<H1> Main Headings <H1>

<H2> Subheadings <H2>

<H3> Subheadings <H3>

After all, don't forget about keywords in subheadings, as they still remain a mainstay for SEO experts; whereas, it's also wise to make the text more readable and well-formated, which is important both for users and Google.

Enrich Your Content with Various Media

A picture is worth a thousand words. That's why adding some media content to your website would help you get some more traffic from Google Images or Video. More than that, the Search Giant simply loves to rank YouTube videos, so if you make a few video tutorials and put them on YouTube.com, you will have all chances to show up on the first pages. As for images or infographics, make sure to optimize your pictures with the main keywords in ALT Tag, reduce the size of the files as much as possible without quality loss, as well as provide description and caption.

Create a Google+ Page

Compared with Facebook, the Google+ social network really lacks popularity, but … it doesn't matter at all. Google cares about all its creations, so they all have incredible SEO value. As soon as you connect your Google+ profile to the website, your picture will be shown next to all of your search results, which makes them more clickable and catchy for users.

Mobile Optimization

Make your website's design responsive.

Just a month ago, Google posted important Webmaster News on 'Finding more mobile-friendly search results'. It says that starting April 21, the search engine will consider mobile-friendliness of a website as a ranking aspect. So, if you want to be rewarded by Google, you should devise a strategy with mobile in mind. Apps and responsive design, viewable on modern devices, are the keys to success in 2015. To gauge your website's usability, you can take a number of mobile-friendly tests available on the official Webmaster Central Blog.

Focus on the Local

Local optimization is going to be vital to higher rankings in 2015. So, now it's more important than never before to make a grab at local SEO and add all the local signals to your website that Google expects it to have. There are several fundamental ways of growing your online business, and these old-school basics are among them - include your city and state in the title tag, content, alt text on images, and your URL.