9 SEO Practices to Strongly Improve Your Google Rankings

It’s old news by now, search engine ranking becomes a tighter and tighter race. Today, climbing Everest is a children’s game compared to ranking on the top 5 Google results.
One thing is clear. To maintain/increase your web ranking, you must make sure that your content is fully optimized and perfectly SEO tuned at any given time.
That being said, let’s cut to the chase.
I put together nine search engine optimization best practices that will get you covered.

Switch to HTTPS! Don’t wait any longer!

To know where to go from here and understand why Google prioritizes HTTPS pages, you should learn the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

What is HTTP?

HTTP is the acronym of ‘hypertext transfer protocol’, and it refers to the system of transmitting and receiving information across the Internet. It is a set of rules for transferring files (text, images, and all types of multimedia files) on the web. This is the way most websites are working.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS stands for ‘hypertext transfer protocol secure’. This protocol makes sure the information entered and housed on a website is protected. Most banks and companies are using HTTPS to keep users’ accounts and payment information secure. A site that uses HTTPS employs an SSL (secured socket layer) to help encrypt the data that enter the site. This encryption will keep the information in perfect security.

What about Google?

More and more, Google favors websites with an HTTPS protocol. Why?
First, we all agree that Google’s main target is to improve the user’s experience on the web. From a security point of view, the big engine assumes that websites using the HTTPS protocol offer a better experience to the users. When it’s about the integrity of the exchanged data and users ‘authentication, Google becomes particularly sensitive, and that explains it all.

By doing the protocol switch, your website will automatically change from http://myawesomesite.com to https://myawesomesite.com.

For more information about the procedure of switching from HTTP to HTTPS check this detailed guide.

Thematic content first

I won’t be the 5000th blogger who writes the phrase ‘Content is king’ if you know what I mean… When it’s about SEO, it is already over known that good-quality and relevant content propels you to the farthest star in the web galaxy.

But creating great content is not enough. It’s equally important to get this content to the right audience at the right moment.

Handling your audience

Firstly, you have to clearly define your target audience. As soon as you know for whom you are writing, you should anticipate possible queries, think about answers, and do it in such a way, that your visitors feel an irresistible urge to come back to your site for fresh and updated information. Not an easy task though. But it’s not impossible either. There are bloggers out there who do a pretty good job of it.

…and Content

The most important step is creating quality content, namely brand-focused, rich in information, new, well documented, and, as much as possible, UNIQUE. When it comes to plagiarized content, Google doesn’t have any sense of humor. It’s not always about purposely ‘copy and paste’ a fragment, sometime you might just fall upon the same catchy/ juicy phrase that someone else out there grabbed before you. No problem. There are many good tools on the web that help you detect plagiarism. I’m using Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker. It’s a free tool, and it does a great job. 100% unique content must be your goal!

Build viral linkable content

You should set the goal of creating content that Internet users, bloggers, and other professionals in your niche would be likely to share. Though it’s a part of your SEO strategy to share your articles on different platforms, when other people share your content, your site or page has more credibility. Of course, you have to awake their interest with new, viral, engaging posts. Easy to say but how to actually… do it? When you’re facing the big white virtual page, that you have to populate with some awesome content within the next 3–4 hours….

The first step, don’t panic! Take a long breath and a long coffee, and…start building your ‘viral’ content strategy.

Viral content…?

Nowadays ‘viral’ is a common word. We find it in social media, associated with a post, we hear it on the TV, related to news or show, and undoubtedly it is in the top ten words of the Urban Dictionary. But what is viral content, anyway?

According to Break Through Content blog, “viral content is any piece of media that suddenly becomes an online sensation. You have almost certainly seen this happen — that indelible image or outrageous video that gets forwarded to you by a dozen friends in under an hour.”

Of course, for a blog post, it doesn’t usually work so fast, but I think you got the idea.

So how to write this sort of content? Nothing simpler 😊 All you have to do is to put yourself in your audience’s skin. What would you like to read about your favorite subject? Maybe some useful information, news, stories, and a bit of advice wouldn’t hurt at all.

Make your content useful

Make sure you throw some fresh, relevant, and practical information in your post. Deliver real stories related to the subject in discussion, put together a set of useful advice (people adore long lists of ‘tips’), and bring up different topics in the field your target audience cares about. This will make them value your brand and engage with it.

Sprinkle some emotion

Emotion is a freeway to success. Marketers know it very well. With the web’s multimedia experience, now you have plenty of opportunities to deliver emotional content. You can do it by any support: video, audio, image, or…simple text. There is a quite large palette of human emotions that can be used if you know how to do it. Compassion, anger, wonder, amazement, fear, empathy, amusement, sadness, joy, pride, all these have been very well exploited by the skilled marketers over time. Here is a great example of emotional content:

In his diagram “Six STEPPS To Virality, Berger resumes it very well:

Focus on longer and relevant long-tail keywords

As Google aims to show more accurate and relevant answers to users’ queries, the long-tail keywords become hugely valuable in the ranking story.

Long-tail keywords consist of less used words, but with a high degree of specificity, related to a certain niche. Even though they aren’t the stars of the web search, the long-tail keywords are less competitive because of their low usage. Moreover, when the users are searching for a highly specific phrase, it means they are looking exactly for that product or service, so they are more likely to turn into customers.

Individually, the long-tail keywords don’t attract many visitors to a website but taken together, they are likely to carry a significant part of the total traffic. Their power should never be underestimated.

To be right on the point of it, it’s very important to have a reliable source of long-tail keywords. Unfortunately, many keyword suggestion tools are focused on generic terms, ignoring the long-tail ones.

Here are some great free keywords research tools you can use in 2021: Google Trends, QuestionDB, AnswerThePublic, Keyword Tool Dominator.

No intrusive advertising!

After a long day of work, you’re at home… You find an interesting article which you must read right away, so you click on it, while in the background your mood-boosting song is playing when…buzzzzz! They come from everywhere, dancing on the screen, invading your virtual private space like a cloud of flies. Your cursor is jumping all over, trying to get rid of those (always!) unexpected and unwelcome invaders. But they are faster, you can’t reach their magic little cross in the upright corner, still keep trying… Finally, you succeed to close one of them, while three new ones are coming to replace it. You have no chance to win this battle. Impossible mission. You give up.

Familiar scenario? I’m sure you all have passed through this nightmare at least once in life. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Those sneaky, sticky, naughty, intrusive advertising always get on your only nerve left.

I’m sure you don’t want your visitors to pass through this.

By the way, starting with this year, the web pages that cannot be accessed in a simple and smooth way risk being penalized in SERP. If you want to be in a good relationship with the search engines and with your visitors, simply avoid advertisements that prevent users from accessing your content in a civilized way. Instead, you can use less intrusive banners, with dedicated space.

Build quality natural backlinks

A ‘backlink’ is an incoming link to a webpage. The quality of a backlink is given by the authority and the relevance of the source that generates it. In other words, it is essential to have backlinks from quality websites, that must be at the same time highly related to your industry. Now more than ever, quality backlinks are the fastest way to move your site to the top of Google.

But keep in mind that too many links coming from a single source might be understood by Google as a sign of spam, while natural links from various sources are always ranking high.

For more information about backlinks building, I recommend this excellent blog post of Brian Dean.

Don’t overlook the structured data

Structured data is highly organized information, which can be easily identified within a digital file and fits into a relational database. This data is added to a page’s HTML markup and it’s immediately findable by simple search algorithms.

Structured data markup allows web crawlers to better understand the web content. There are some elements, obvious to human understanding, which are simply unintelligible to search engines. The role of structured data is to help search engines to understand the provided information and generate rich snippets (small chunks of information that appear in search results).

Here is an example of how rich snippets can enhance the appearance of your search results list.

The rating stars are likely to catch people’s eyes and increase the CTR for these results.
Moreover, structured data indicates to search engines that information on a given page is relevant to the results.

Here you can find more information about adding structured data to your website.

Vocal Search comes into play

According to the statistics, more than 50% of the users are already using voice search on a daily basis, and this percentage is constantly growing.

You may want to re-think your content for this type of search. At this level, it’s important to understand the user’s conversational speech. Vocal research favors longer sentences and the use of everyday words. At the same time, the long-tail keywords (specific) are preferred over the short-tail ones (generic).
If you want to know more about Voice Search SEO Strategies in 2021, here is a very good resource.

Local SEO is preferred by Google

Search engines are continually refining the process of searching, bringing more targeted results to the users. A high percentage of web searches is related to local searches, as users are interested in learning about the services available in their area. If you have a business of any kind, don’t even think to miss Google My Business page. Make sure that you fill in all the necessary information related to the services you’re offering.

At the same time, focus on listing your business on different local directories and on getting reviews, as they have a direct influence on local search rankings. You can find the local directories in your area, using the keyword [your city] directory in the search.

Here is a good article about listing your business online for local SEO.

No matter how SEO evolves over time, there is the golden rule to follow: always think about the real humans who are visiting your site and reading your posts. They don’t think in 0 and 1 and have no idea about any SEO rules. Write for them as you are writing for yourself. Just be a writer and a reader at the same time. That’s the only way to understand your audience from within and give them some great content. Take it step by step and you’ll make it.