19 Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Positioning Right Now

Reputation Defender
5 min readAug 13, 2016

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Image courtesy of WDnet Studio at Pexels.com

Let’s take a look at a number of tips that can easily be applied to your site to increase visitors from search engines. We’ll sort and classify all the steps that you can follow and the tools needed to do the SEO.

Surely this SEO guide will significantly increase your visits. In the end, a good positioning in Google means more visits, which is certainly something we do care about.

Learn about SEO without being an expert in programming

We have tried to select tips for which it was not necessary to have a great knowledge of HTML or code editing. Given that the issue of programming your page is very important, most are simple changes that will be explained, or that you yourself can do with a little help from a plugin. If you use WordPress, you’re in luck!

Google positioning through keywords

1. Choose your keywords well: define what queries or expressions are people going to try to use in order to find you. Consider the number of searches for each term to find your best keywords. You can use Google Trends to define your strategy of organic positioning in Google.

2. Check the competition: You can use the following tool to check not only the number of searches for each keyword, but also how competitive they are. Then you will know which words are more affordable according to the popularity of your website: Google Keyword Planner

3. Measure the density of the words: Scan your page and discover what words are you using more. Try to repeat those that you want to position well. Use this Keyword Density Analysis Tool.

4. Use the keywords: Use them in your texts, tags and categories. The first 200 words of each page are more valuable, so it’s a good idea to have a lead that summarizes the article. Not only does this encourage reading, you can also use this strategy to position your keywords.

5. Use keywords in titles and bold them: If you can, use them to create titles and to base yourself on them for your content. If you can highlight a few words with boldface in each article, you’ll make it easier for Google to index you.

6. Measure and analyze your organic positioning for different keywords: Check the rankings in search engines for all of your keywords. You can install the following free tool on your computer: CuteRank will tell you the page number where you’ll appear on Google for each query.

Tips for your site’s configuration

7. Meta description and title: Define, for each page of your website, a description and a title in the Meta tags of each heading or “<head>”. These are the titles and descriptions that appear in Google and those who are intended to attract attention. If you use WordPress, you can use the All in One SEO Pack plugin. You’ll get new SEO forms for each article.

8. Have friendly, edited URLs: Use a system to write URLs that resemble your titles. You can shorten and edit them so that they contain the largest number of keywords. In WordPress you can activate this feature in Settings, and you’ll be able to edit each URL while editing each article.

9. Create and send your sitemap to search engines: sitemaps help search engines index your site and keep them updated on their cache. Google and Bing have their own pages for you to send them your files. You can use XML Sitemaps Generator.

10. Automate the sending of your sitemaps: As sending the sitemaps should be done every time there is a change, it is best to automate it. With WordPress, we can do this with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

11. Transcribe your audiovisual content: The content of your videos or presentations is not indexed by Google, so it’s a good idea to create a text transcript if you can.

12. Favicon: The favicon is the small logo that appears in each tab and in the bookmarks, and identifies each website. You can create your own and upload it to your template with favicon.cc.

13. Avoid using cookies: unnecessary requests and problems with data privacy.

14. Use the tag rel=”author”: It sets the authorship of your publications and displays the image of the author in search engines. It will help draw attention to your articles and give them personality in Google.

Image courtesy of egativespace.co at Pexels.com

Images in Search Engine Optimization

15. Title and description: Include the TITLE and ALT tags in all images. Otherwise, search engines won’t know what they are and will not index them. You can use SEO Friendly Images in WordPress to automatically fill these out.

16. Specify a size: Always define what is the size of the image, either in HTML with the “width” and “height” tags, or in WordPress when editing. Otherwise the browser will change the page size and the image will not look good until the page has loaded completely. Google wants the sizes of the images to be defined beforehand.

17. Do not scale images in HTML: Decide which is the size of each image in the article and upload that size. If you make it smaller with HTML or your blog’s CMS, the large version will be the one that loads anyway.

18. Optimize your images for the web: Use a compressor or the “save for web” option in Photoshop. You don’t need the highest image quality for the web and images are quite large for download times. We want the page to load as quickly as possible. You can use the Smush it plugin, a tool that lets you automatically improve the compression of your images.

19. Combine images using CSS sprites: If your template or design uses many small images together, it is recommended that you combine them into a single image and define the links using CSS sprites.

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