With Google constantly updating its search engine algorithms, it’s pretty challenging to rank high or continue ranking higher on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). The message is clear – align your SEO efforts with updated algorithms or get ready to lose potential traffic and growth opportunities.
To help you align your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy with the latest SEO developments, we will reveal the top 5 tips for optimizing your SEO in 2021.
Why is SEO Important in 2021?
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased dependency on the internet significantly. Before 2020, people used to roam around the cities to shop, dine, and watch movies.
However, the pandemic changed the trend, and people started using the internet for shopping, ordering food, streaming media, and even for work/jobs. This over-indulgence on the internet is going to continue in 2021 and after that also.
2021 is the time to modify SEO strategies and gain from the changing scenarios. You should see it as an opportunity to enhance your online presence, reach, and traffic.
5 Tips for Optimizing Your SEO in 2021
You can follow these top 5 tips to optimize your SEO and get a higher rank on SERPs:
1. Provide a Better Page Experience
Page experience is a collection of indicators used to assess the user experience on a webpage beyond its informational value. Google announced in the May 2021 update that page experience signals would affect search rankings in the future.
It means you should evaluate your website and check whether its pages are in harmony with page experience signals or not. Pages in accord with these signals usually rank higher in search results.
To provide a better page experience, you can:
- Learn about and use the tools to measure core web vitals. They help in addressing the issues related to visual stability, interactivity, and loading.
- Make sure your website/web pages work perfectly on mobile devices.
- Check your site for any safe-browsing issues. It must be free from deceptive or/and malicious content.
- In the address bar, look for HTTPS. Make sure your website is offering a secure connection.
- To make the content on your pages easily accessible, ensure that there are no intrusive interstitials.
2. Use Keywords
Don’t believe anyone saying that keywords are dead because of recent developments in search engine algorithms. Keywords were, are, and will remain an essential component of search engine’s ranking algorithms.
It’s true that Google values its users and wants to give them the best experience on the web. Your ranking will improve if you also provide an enhanced user experience, but it doesn’t mean keeping keywords away from your content.
Just remember one thing that Google is now more intelligent and efficient in detecting flaws. So, make sure keywords are not overused and fit logically in the sentences.
You can consider these best practices of using keywords:
- Use keywords research tools, like Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Word Stream, etc., to find keywords capable of enhancing your visibility and ranking on SERPs.
- Add primary keyword to the page’s title. If your keyword in the title is relevant to the searchers’ keyword, you’ll benefit from search engines and get more traffic.
- Make it a habit to include your primary keyword in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and meta descriptions. Doing so helps search engines classify your page as a suitable answer to users’ queries.
- And the most important is to add primary and secondary keywords to your content. Make sure you use relevant keywords and keep the keyword density between 1-4 percent.
- Avoid overstuffing keywords, using only one keyword, or Including keywords that are identical to those used by your competitors.
3. Give Priority to Long-Form Content
Although there is no rule that short-form content will not rank higher, long-form content has a competitive advantage in terms of SEO ranking potential. It is capable of earning more shares and links.
Moreover, Google expects you to prepare content considering the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) concept. It’s tough to incorporate this concept into short-form content, but things become easy when infusing it into long-form content.
To create better long-form content, you should:
- First, define what format your content should have. Will the listicle be right, or how-to, or any other?
- Decide a topic you want to cover. Go for evergreen subjects that have a healthy yearly search volume.
- Create the long-form content. Depending on your audience and the knowledge you are offering, the actual length may vary from 1,000 words to 5,000+ words. Your chances to rank higher increase dramatically if you create a content hub.
4. Optimize Images
Images and pictures make the content more impactful. However, if you want to get more out of them, such as improved SEO rankings, make sure they’re properly optimized.
When adding pictures to your content, remember that huge images take more time to load. They increase the overall load time of your webpage, which is not a good thing for SEO. Therefore, you must consider factors like image size and format.
To optimize images and pictures for SEO, you should:
- Reduce the size of your photos while maintaining their quality. Use an image compression tool. Remember, over-compression will reduce the file size but make the image quality poor.
- Choose the correct file format. The most common ones for the web are JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG.
- Optimize the name of your image files. Add relevant and descriptive target keywords, use hyphens to separate them, and avoid underscores because search engines don’t acknowledge them.
- To ensure search crawlers understand what your images are about, add alt text to them.
- Add captions to images on your web pages.
5. Focus on External Links
If your website is a trustworthy source, search engines will rank it higher. And the easiest way to enhance your website’s credibility is to add and get external links. External links are both links coming from other websites and links going to other websites.
The SEO signals Google uses to rank pages are anchor text, PageRank, and others. If your external links succeed in passing these signals, Google will prefer you over others.
You can consider some of these best practices for creating external links:
- Publish valuable and helpful content.
- To discover pages conceptually related to your page or domain, type related:yoursite.com into the Google search box.
- You may include as many external links as you like to your text till it seems natural and your readers are not distracted.
- Avoid adding external links to navigational elements, first sentences, headings, landing pages, and elements users can’t see.
- Try to prevent keyword stuffing if you’re integrating keywords into the anchor text. You can also use a single long-tail keyword to characterize the link.
- Take into account the factors that lead to high-quality external linking.
Wrapping It Up
So there you have it: the top 5 SEO recommendations for 2021. These are only a handful, but they may be pretty beneficial. Whether you want to optimize your own or someone else’s website, they’ll assist you in making well-informed decisions and improving your SEO efforts.
Lastly, keep in mind that winning the SEO game in 2021 and beyond will require understanding your target audience and providing them a better user experience.
