Top 50 Ways To Improve SEO Rankings in 2023

Organic traffic is the most sustainable and reliable way of getting business. And to get organic traffic, top rankings are a must. You can never receive tangible traffic unless you have prominent rankings in search engine result pages.

Websites ranking on the first page get the most clicks. Furthermore, on the first page, top-ranking websites enjoy the maximum traffic.

Hence, the only way to get a free source of organic traffic is first-page rankings. This is the reason every website owner desires the top rankings, which results in cut-throat competition. So, how do you get the top rankings?

In this article, we’ll discuss the top legit SEO techniques of 2023 to improve your rankings and help you drive significant traffic or business.

Speed Up Your Site Loading

Before discussing SEO to improve organic rankings, you should know that search engines consider various factors while calculating the rankings. Google employs more than 200 factors while assigning the rankings to the websites for a query. Loading speed is one of the ranking factors, and slow website loading speed keeps you from achieving prominent rankings. Google wants to give the best search experience to the users, and people don’t like slow websites. So, both users and search engines don’t prefer a slow website, and you have to speed up your site loading to get the apex rankings.

You can use the PageSpeed Insights tool to measure your site rankings on desktops and mobiles. You also get recommendations for improving your site speed.

Speed Up Your Website Loading — Source: Levitydigital

Curate 10X Quality Content

Content is the fuel of SEO, and rich quality content is a necessity to see the best SEO results. You need to create exclusive content that users can only have with you. Any copied or rephrased content won’t help you achieve the top rankings. So, it’s better you use your industry expertise to curate the content that passes the value to the users. Google promotes quality content, and if you have to, you surely get a preference in rankings.

You can use the content for various purposes like brand awareness, educating the audience, promoting products, lead generation, etc. The thumb rule is always to create the best content for the users. The moment you create content to manipulate the search results, you get on the wrong track, and you’ll never accomplish your goals.

Do Image Optimization

Images are a must in the site content to make it more engageable and make users stay on your web pages. Better engagement helps you increase your rankings, which is our ultimate goal. However, images increase the page size and slow down the loading speed, which affects your rankings negatively. Image optimization is about compressing the images to improve the loading speed and adding other information like image alt text and image name to rank in the image search. Moreover, define the right size of your image so your graphics don’t spoil the user experience, which is a major ranking factor. So, image optimization is a must SEO tactic that you must do to get the top rankings.

Use Header Tags

Heading tags are not a ranking factor, but again these affect the user experience and engagement, which are the prominent ranking factors. Header tags are the HTML attributes used to define the headings and subheadings. This improves the readability for the users and helps crawlers better understand the page content. Heading tags can even help you rank as featured snippets on the relevant queries. It’s a standard SEO practice, and you should do this for all your pages to achieve high rankings.

Do Blogging

Blogging isn’t necessary but is a great way to nurture your top funnel audience. People just don’t buy things, and it includes hours of research before making the purchase. You can do blogging to provide the content for the research for your target customers. You can also do an introduction to your brand through blogs. Blogs help you address the pain points of the customers and help them choose your products. This way, you’ll facilitate the whole buyer journey, improving your conversions. Moreover, the blog content will help you rank on the research-related keywords of your business. This way, customers become aware of your brand and consider it during the conversion.

Consider Authoritative Outbound Links

There is a popular rumor that giving links to other websites degrades your authority and rankings. It’s not; you can give links to other websites on your website, but they should have high authority and must make sense to the users. Irrelevant and low authority links are useless for users, and they won’t visit those or return as soon as they see the page. Search engines can track this and know that your outbound links are not for users and are only there for manipulating the search engines. This kind of link kills the user experience, which causes a drop in rankings. So, you are open to giving outbound links, but they should have high authority and relevance.

Use Visuals with Text Content

As aforementioned content is the fuel of SEO, but that doesn’t mean text content. You can mix up the different formats to make your content more readable and enticing. You can use the video, images, infographics, gifs, etc., to improve the engagement of the content and earn better rankings. So, add the ornaments to your content with visuals to hook the user’s attention and engage them.

Visual Content Marketing Stats — Source: Venngage

Prioritize Readability in Content

To engage with your content, your readers must understand the content. When you curate web content, it’s not about writing sophisticated language with a hard vocabulary. If you do so, there will be no engagement on your content, and you don’t get the desired rankings. So, know your audience, and make your content according to their level. Generic content for professional or expert audiences is also undesirable. So, make sure your audience understands your content easily. If you are using jargon, then define them or use simple alternatives. Maximum user engagement is the goal of the content to get higher rankings.

Optimize Broken Links

When you click on a page link, and that page is moved, deleted, or misspelled the URL, then that link is broken. When you click on the broken link, it shows the “page not found” error. Broken links are normal, but too many of them make it look like you are not maintaining your site properly. Moreover, broken links frustrate the users, and search engines don’t like it. Search engines want to give the best experience to the searchers, and you have to consider it to get the top rankings. So, find out the broken links on your site and optimize them to make a step forward towards better search engine results rankings.

Be Mobile-Friendly

The number of smartphone subscriptions worldwide today surpasses six billion and is forecasted to grow by several hundred million in the next few years further. (Statista)

Percentage of mobile device website traffic worldwide — Source: Statista

Mobile is the most used device, and that’s why search engines give significant importance to mobile friendliness. Your website must be mobile-compatible and give the best user experience on different screen sizes. Mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor, and your website must be mobile-compliant to get the first-page rankings.

You may consider the AMP or responsive web design to make your site work perfectly on mobiles.

Structure Your Page Correctly

Site structure has a major impact on the user engagement and crawling of the site. Sometimes crawlers can’t read and index some pages due to complicated structures. Moreover, users can’t move across the website smoothly, which affects the users’ engagement and conversion rates. In both cases, your rankings go down. So. it’s necessary to make a site structure that provides easy accessibility.

Mention Contact Details

Earning online trust is the most tricky task, but still, you have to do it to make people believe in your brand and become your customers. One way to do this is to provide clear contact details and addresses so that people can interact with you easily.

People will never convert with you if they don’t see any contact details because it creates suspicion in people’s heads. So, provide the contact details in a place where users can easily find them. It’s the SEO content practice influenced by Google’s EAT algorithm. Create the content the way Google wants to get the paramount rankings.

Build Social Media Presence

Social media doesn’t seem related to SEO, but it influences the SEO and search rankings. Search engines consider social signals to check your topical authority and assign rankings. Google can even crawl the tweets and show them in the search results. So, don’t limit your SEO to websites only. You should make a strong social media presence to drive traffic and get authority to earn the top rankings.

Use Keywords Wisely

A major part of the SEO strategy revolves around keywords. Keywords are the various phrases people use to search for products/services you are selling. You have to include the right keywords on your website to appear in the search results when people search. Before you flood your website with keywords, stop! Search engines promote the use of keywords as long as they make sense to the users.

If you just fill your content with keywords, then it will not pass any value to the users. Hence, no engagement and no rankings. Google’s advanced language processing algorithms can easily understand unnatural content, and you don’t get the rankings. So, be wise while optimizing the keywords and following the best SEO practices.

Make Click-worthy Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta title and description are not ranking factors but play a notable role in SEO results. Meta title and description appear in the search results, and it completely depends on your title and description whether users will click and visit your site or not. A good meta title and description get the clicks, which improves the CTR (Click-Through-Rate). Higher the CTR, the more traffic you get.

Higher CTR signals that you are reliable for users, and you get an improvement in rankings. However, clickbait titles and descriptions aren’t recommended because they will increase the CTR, but people will immediately return to the search results if they don’t find what they expected. This will increase the bounce rate, which shows a bad user experience, and you’ll never get the desired rankings. So, write the legit meta titles and descriptions that drive traffic to your site from search and help you improve rankings.

Make Click-worthy Meta Titles and Descriptions — Source: MyWebDesignBoston

Do URL Optimization

A search snippet has three things: Title, Description, and URL. We’ve already discussed the title and description. Now, we’ll know the SEO importance of URLs and how it influences rankings. When people analyze a search snippet, they see the URLs as well.

If your web page URL is non-human readable and doesn’t project what users will get after a click, then you might not get the click. Non-human readable URLs with special characters and random numbers make your page look unsafe. People are highly concerned about their security online, and they don’t click on your website search snippet. So, make your URL readable and always show what the user will get in a compact and meaningful way.

Include Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

LSIs are not the keywords but still help you establish the topical authority about your niche. LSIs are like the integral terms of the niche, but not keywords. For the car business, keywords are “buy cars,” “buy new cars,” and “affordable cars,” but the LSI will be mileage, engine power, top speed, etc. LSI helps the crawlers better understand your content and find the relevancy of your content for the topic. So, always mind the LSIs in your content to see better results in rankings.

Declutter Your Code

Most businesses don’t have knowledge about the technical parts of the website, and they completely overlook the technical SEO. Websites are made with tons of codes, and those codes have a lot of white space, which slows down the compilation or website loading. So, clean up your website code and minify it to fasten your website and fulfill the criteria of ranking factor: site loading speed.

Be Part of the Community

Website optimization is fine to get the rankings, but you have to be selfless as well. There are various platforms like Quora, Reddit, and other niche-specific channels, where you can share your expertise to help others. You can answer the questions that are related to your niche. This way, you build authority in the market, and you can also introduce your business as a reliable solution to their problems. The idea is to become helpful, not promotional. You may understand this thin line and become part of the community. You get the traffic from these channels and also get the authority, which will help you rank well.

Create and Share Infographics

65% of brands use infographics for marketing purposes. (Xerox)

Infographics are the source of vast information in a compact and graphical representation. Infographics are one of the most liked content formats, and you must create these for your business to have exceptional engagement and shares. People share such content easily, and you’ll get better audience exposure, which will drive more traffic and engagement. Traffic and engagement are the ranking signals, and you’ll be placed in better positions in search.

Podcasts

Podcasts are a great way to reach a vast audience in a short time and drive traffic to your online business. You can easily find various industry-specific podcasts where you can share your insights and introduce your brand. You may reach the podcasts to get interviewed and accomplish your goal. It’s not necessary for you only go on the popular podcasts only, and you may consider the less popular ones to extend your reach to some extent. Podcasts will increase your site traffic and search on brand keywords, which benefit your search results rankings.

Use the Power of the Press

News channels have a vast active user base, and you can reach those with press releases. If you can’t afford to press releases on big channels, you can start with industry-specific ones so that you only get the attention of your prospects only.

You can use the press releases for announcements, product launches, and other things that concern your potential audience. You can have ample traffic with press releases, which is one of the main targets of online businesses.

Update Old Content

Google wants to show fresh and quality content to the users. So, if you created some amazing content in the past, then don’t let that content lose its efficiency over time. You may update the content regularly according to the latest trends and updates to get the benefit of freshness. You can even incorporate the updated user intent as well to nurture your audience in the right way and earn business. Hence, upkeep the freshness of your content to acquire SEO rankings.

Earn Quality Backlinks

Backlinks or inbound links are one of the prominent ranking factors. Backlinks are the links from external websites to your website. Inbound links work as votes or recommendations from other websites.

This gives you online authority and escalates your rankings. You are free to do the link building to get the backlinks, but make sure those backlinks are from high authority and relevant websites. Moreover, the backlinks must have value for the users; otherwise, backlinks with no clicks won’t aid your rankings.

So, earn some quality backlinks and enjoy improved rankings.

Earn Quality Backlinks — Source: Backlinko

Consider Domain Diversity

Multiple recommendations from one source aren’t as effective or impactful as recommendations from multiple sources. Search engines also consider this, and you should get quality backlinks from unique domains. Many backlinks from the same website won’t help you climb the search result pages. So, reach out to different relevant websites and get backlinks to perform better in online searches.

Get Your Business On Google My Business

When you are a local business and need nearby customers to convert to your business, local search rankings are necessary. 97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else. (SEO Tribunal)

Google My Business allows businesses to make their listing for free. When you set up your business profile on Google My Business, local people will be able to see your business when they search. You don’t need to have a website to make an online presence. Google My Business gives an online platform for local companies to earn business. So, make your listing on GMB and other popular citation & directory websites to attract local customers.

Why You Need Local SEO — Source: ResultDrivenSEO

Write Skyscraper Content

Skyscraper content is a great way to have stable rankings. Skyscraper content is creating long-form content, which is supported by its subpages. This kind of content talks about a broad topic and covers each topic of this broad topic to get the rankings on all possible keywords of that topic. Skyscraper content is hyper-detailed content, and that’s why it helps you earn some quality backlinks as well. So, add skyscraper content to your content strategy to have top rankings for various keywords.

Optimize for Google News

If you are a news site, then Google News is the place you should optimize for. Google News shows news snippets below the search box and has a dedicated tab “News” in search results as well. So, Google News can help you drive people to your news or informational content. So, optimize for Google News and achieve the top rankings to get some tangible traction on your pages. You need to follow some Google News policies to get approved as a Google News site and appear in news snippets.

Be the Expert in Your Niche

Search engines want you to serve your audience’s best content. Generic content that is already there on the web can’t help you fetch better search rankings. According to Google’s EAT (Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness) algorithm, your content must offer expert knowledge to perform better in search.

As a business owner, you must have in-depth knowledge of the field. You need to share this expert knowledge with your audience to get engagement and rankings consequently. People only stay on the quality and valuable content. So, target the quality and best information in your content to see improvements in the rankings. Content with the best information and meticulous details also helps you get a plethora of shares and backlinks, which escalates your rankings.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing seems like a paid option, but with the right tactic, you can use it for free as well. You can drive huge traffic to your business with influencer marketing, and that traffic aids your rankings. Traffic increases your rankings because it shows your popularity among people, and search engines show what people like.

For influencer marketing, all you have to do is find an influencer from your niche and analyze the type of content he talks about or is passionate about. Once you are done with the research, create amazing content related to the influencer’s interest and share it with them through social media. If the influencer likes your content, he’ll share your content, and here you go. In case the influencer doesn’t share your content, then still you have fantastic content that is curated to attract your target customers. So, total win-win!!

Repurpose Content

SEO includes regular content creation, and sometimes marketers and business owners struggle to find new topics for content development. In this case, you can use your existing content to make new content. Filter your top-performing content, and repurpose them. For example, you can use a blog to make your new video or infographics.

A video to create a new blog or social post. This way, you can use your existing content to create content in different formats. Content repurposing helps you get potential results from your content ideas. As you take your existing content for new content development, do some research for the latest information and add it to the repurposed content.

Hence, you never run short on content ideas, and regular content will push up your rankings.

Appear in Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the answer boxes where search engines provide the direct answer to the user’s queries. Usually, people don’t consider ranking as featured snippets because users directly see the intended information and don’t visit the site. However, if you don’t rank as a featured snippet, someone else will, and you still don’t get the traffic.

If you appear as a featured snippet, there is a high chance that people who need detailed information will visit your site. When you optimize for featured snippet rankings, you follow some amazing SEO steps that help you rank in the zero position. Zero position rankings get the maximum user exposure and drive traffic. So, if you want top rankings, prepare your pages for featured snippets.

Improve Your Dwell Time

Dwell time is the time people spend on your page after clicking your site link from SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). Dwell time shows the quality of your content and how much users are engaging with your content. Hence, make your content more compelling and engrossing to engage your site visitors, which will increase your dwell time and rankings consequently. You may add graphics, videos, animations, etc., to your site content, which completely match the user’s intent to increase the dwell time of your pages.

Use Site Links

Site links are the additional URLs that come under the main URL of your site in search results. Site links can boost your CTR, which influences your rankings positively. To get the site links in your search snippet, you have to make a table of content on each page.

Make a table of content with jump links so people can easily access the specific section of your content. That’s it! Search engine crawlers read your page and list your table content links as site links in the search results.

Get More SERP Real Estate

Nowadays, search engines show videos, images, and website links in the search results. For example, you have content that is ranking in the 4th position and driving decent traffic. However, you can double up your traffic by making a video on the same topic and optimizing it in the right way to rank on the first page. This way, you have more SERP real estate, which will help you get more clicks. More clicks mean more CTR, and higher CTR elevates the rankings.

Find and Target New Keywords

Keyword research and optimization aren’t one-time things, and you need to do it regularly to win top rankings on all possible keywords and earn the most business. Over time new terminologies and new products come up in the market, and you should know about these. You should keep an eye on the changing trends and find new keywords to include in your SEO strategy. You may consider competitor research and trends research to find new keywords.

Secure Your Site with HTTPS

Search engines are highly concerned about the users’ security, and that’s why security is a ranking factor. Only safe sites get the chance to rank on the first page of the search engine results pages. When a user clicks on a site link, a connection is formed between the browser and the site’s server under the HTTP protocol. Now, HTTP has no protection and is vulnerable to malware and other cyber attacks. HTTPS has SSL (Security Socket Layers), which secures the connection and makes the data transfer safe. So, it’s crucial for your site to work on HTTPS to get the top rankings. You can reach your hosting provider to get the SSL for your site.

Align with Search Intent

Search intent is the intentions of the user for which they came to your site. Now, users will stay only if your site fulfills their intent. Hence, you should know the different intents of your target audience and curate exclusive content for each intent. Make sure your content is entirely relatable to the search intent because then only you’ll have the maximum audience engagement. Irrelevant content doesn’t help you hold your audience and increase the bounce rate, which isn’t good for rankings. So, align your content with search intent to improve audience engagement and win the Everest rankings.

Apply Structured Data Markup

Structured data markups or schema markups are the data vocabulary that helps search engines to better understand the content. It gives additional information about the content to the search engines so that it can show the content correctly in the search results.

Schema markups can help your brand appear in knowledge panels. Structured data also trigger rich snippets. Hence, you can get better rankings and get more user attention with rich snippets. You can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to incorporate the schema markup on your site.

Correct Your NAP Inconsistencies

In earlier points, it’s mentioned making business listings on popular business directories to get nearby customers. In business listings, NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) is important. Sometimes these details change due to some reasons, but business owners forget to update these on their business listing.

It causes NAP inconsistencies, and crawlers find different information for the same business, which degrades your authority. So, if you want strong local online rankings, always keep your NAP uniform across all channels.

Utilize User-Generated Content

User-generated content is a great way to brag about your reliability and interact with your audience to build relationships. Whether it’s commenting on your blog, reviews on products, or comments on your social posts, you can use all the positive ones as proof of your quality. This way, you can attract new users to become your customers.

Moreover, you may respond to comments or reshare the user’s content to make digital interactions with them. User-generated content can even help you find new content ideas that your audience is interested in. All these ways increase engagement and customer relationships, which boosts your rankings and conversions.

Diagnose and Recover from Penalties

A manual search engine penalty can be the reason your rankings aren’t improving. Sometimes people use prohibited SEO techniques and do extensive spamming, which gets them penalized. You can check the Google Search Console tool to know whether you have a manual penalty or not. If you have the penalty, then you have to diagnose the violations and optimize them to lift the penalty. So, recover from penalties and follow legit SEO practices to get beneficial search engine rankings.

Improve Crawlability

You know that crawling is the initial step to get your site indexed in the Google servers and appear in search results. Hence, it’s vital for your site to avail complete crawling to index all your web pages and get them ranked in search engine results. Sometimes, due to complex site structure and poor interlinking, some pages get abandoned. These abandoned pages don’t get crawled and indexed. Hence, you miss all the traffic that those pages would have induced. So, make sure your site is fully crawlable, and there are no abandoned pages.

Properly Manage Your robots.txt

Robots.txt files are the crawler directives that guide search engine bots about how to crawl the site and which pages will be excluded from crawling. However, robots.txt files have some syntax, and you must follow those strictly to manage the healthy crawling and indexing of your site. Otherwise, any mistake can block spiders from crawling and indexing the site, and there will be no rankings. So, handle your Robots.txt files with caution to avail search engines for crawling and appear in the search results.

Avoid Black Hat Link-Building Techniques

Backlinks are one of the prominent ranking factors and have a major influence on the rankings. There are some techniques to build backlinks to improve your online authority and rankings. However, there are some link-building techniques that are prohibited by search engines, and use of them can never get you rankings. Moreover, excessive use of these bad link-building practices can even get penalized or permanently de-indexed. Google even launched the Penguin algorithm to detect illegitimate link-building techniques and limit them.

So, don’t waste your time on such deceptive techniques, and follow the best link-building practices to get quality links and the best rankings.

Earn Happy Customer Reviews

Happy customer reviews can improve the conversion rate of your business. Positive reviews are like recommendations from the people who used your product/services. Nowadays, people give significant importance to reviews, and good reviews increase the chances of conversion. So, always serve your customers best to get some good reviews. You also treat the negative review in the right way, with a humble response and appropriate compensation. Your motive behind top rankings is to earn business, and positive customer reviews will help you do that. Always remember humans are your customers, not search engines. So, be customer-friendly, and you’ll get rankings as a reward from search engines.

Humanize Your Brand

You need to earn the customer’s trust to get their conversions. To get the trust, you have to build a relationship through regular interactions with your customers. Corporate mindsets and being promotional all the time can’t help you get conversions. Show the human side of your brand through live sessions, comments, DM replies, giveaways, empathic actions, etc. For example, many brands delivered free masks and sanitizers with orders to keep their customers safe during a pandemic. Such actions strengthen the relationship with customers and improve brand loyalty. Brand loyalty gives you a consistent cash flow and nurtures your business growth. Your local customers also send new customers to you, which helps you get better rankings.

Be Voice-Search Ready

Voice search is the future. As you can see, there are various voice search-activated devices in the market. The share of voice search is increasing rapidly and will soon be the dominant way of online search. Hence, it’s necessary for your business to optimize for voice search to get the rankings in voice search results and earn the business. People don’t use compact keywords in voice search, and you need to use more natural and conversational language to win the rankings in voice search.

Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals are the new page experience ranking signals that were launched recently in June 2021. These factors focus on the loading, interactivity, and visual stability of the website. You can use the tools like PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse to know your core web vitals score and get the appropriate recommendations for improvement. So, get good core web vitals to score to achieve the top SEO rankings in search results.

Keep Up with Search-Engine’s Algorithm Updates

Search engines keep updating their algorithms to improve the search experience for the users. SEO results are highly affected by these updates, and you need to track and optimize according to the search engine updates to have the apex rankings consistently. Otherwise, your today’s rankings will disappear soon if you don’t mind the new search engine updates.

To keep your search strategy up to date, stay tuned with the search engine algorithm updates to get and preserve your top rankings.

Congratulations!!

Now you know the best ways of getting top SEO rankings.

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