Search engine optimization (SEO) is multi-faceted. It is an umbrella term that involves various aspect, and each area pertains to a tedious process. That’s why businesses let the experts do SEO for them.

Then again, even if you outsource the job, it is your website. It would be helpful to understand what the SEO company is doing to optimize your site for better search ranking. At any point, you may do small tweaks here and there to optimize your website further.

Of course, you can only contribute to this if you know what SEO tactics to implement. The importance of this practice is not only ensuring that your website is in optimal condition, but also pinpointing things that your SEO services provider may have missed.

And hey, the year presents opportunities to make SEO better with these quick SEO wins!

Quick SEO wins to increase ranking and traffic

1) Check your site’s performance

Backlink is the currency of SEO. Backlink is a crucial trust signal. To emphasize, it is one of more than 200 ranking factors. No one can ignore a good backlink profile especially not you.

If you want to know how your website is performing backlinks-wise, you can check in real-time.

• Go to Majestic SEO and Moz‘s websites

• Put your domain name (URL) on the field then hit search

• Make sure you are using the right domain (http vs https and www vs non-www)

In the first tool, you may see the trust flow and citation flow. The first one is, of course, tells you how trustworthy your domain is while the second one highlights how influential that domain is. These metrics pertain to the perceived quality of your website.

Head to the anchor text section to determine which keywords perform best. A spammy backlink profile can ruin all the metrics that your website have built over time.

While on the second tool, you will see metrics such as domain authority, page authority and the total number of links. Domain authority is all about your website’s ranking potential in search engines. The higher it is, the better it will rank on Google’s results pages. Page authority is the same as domain authority although the difference is the ranking potential of the homepage.

Below the actual metrics are the inbound links that somehow gives your backlink profile a boost. Since you can see which pages link to your domain, you may easily gauge the quality of each internal link.

Registering on both sites is optional.

2) Check your site speed

Speed is essential for both the website owner and the users. As one of the critical ranking factors, it could be the difference between which site to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs)–yours or your competitor’s. All things being equal, that is.

Aside from that, users will close your

You can check your speed score on desktop and mobile.

• Go to PageSpeed Insights

• Put your website URL on the field

• Hit Analyze

The tool will display your scores. If the scores are in red, improvements must be made

While at it, check the mobile-friendliness of your website.

• Go to Mobile-Friendly Test

• Enter your URL

• Initiate the test by clicking Run Test

The result should show like below.

Also, click View Details to see additional instructions from Google to make your website render better on mobile devices.

Another way to test for mobile-friendliness is through Think With Google. Enter your URL and click the arrow button. The next screen will show your site’s loading time and estimated visitor loss.

Additionally, click the Get My Free Report button below. Put your email address and expect to see the report within an hour. You may scrutinize the report that includes suggestions on how you can make your site faster.

3) Check your content

It does not have to be the blog section alone, but the entire website if you can manually check them all.

Start with the homepage.

• Is the content human readable?

• Is the content formatted to make it easier to read?

• Are there any media to support the text content?

• Are call to action buttons on their right places?

• Is there at least 300 words on each page?

• Are all information updated?

• Is there an updated sitemap?

Speaking of quick SEO wins content-wise, there are secret techniques that you can apply.

1) Create SEO-friendly permalinks

Permalink, which is a portmanteau of permanent and link, refers to the URL of a page or blog post. Make it short and descriptive. The simpler, the better. Users can easily type and remember these URLs than their complex counterparts. Definitely! Also, Google gives more weight to permalinks that are up to five words long.

2) Begin the title with the primary keyword

A landing page may target up to three related keywords. However, the main keyword should be first word(s) of the title. It will be easier for the search engine to establish what the page or post is all about if the primary keyword is already evident in the title. Yes, Google reads the URL first, the title afterward.

3) Put the primary keyword in the h1 tag

Some SEOs suggest putting it either in h1 or h2 tag. But to aid the crawling process, it would be better to put it in your h1 tag.

4) Put the primary keyword in the first paragraph

Google also determines relevance. Once it crawled the h elements, the bots will then analyze your content. If it doesn’t include the primary keyword used in the permalink, title and h1 tag, it might get confused what the topic is all about. Put it in the first paragraph, specifically within the first 100 words.

5) Include a modifier in the title

Modifiers are adjectives, adverbs or nouns that are used attributively. Words like ‘best,’ ‘review,’ ‘efficient,’ ‘2016,’ etc. are examples of these words. They make for a perfect addition to your long tail keyword.

6) Use LSI keywords in your content

LSI keywords refer to those keywords that are semantically related to the primary keyword. If you have no idea what it is, perhaps you’ve seen Google suggestions on related searches that you often find at the bottom of the results pages. Sprinkle some of these in your contents so you can enhance your chance of showing up in these results pages.

7) Include outbound links

A rich link portfolio boosts not just the ranking of specific pages, but the entire website. This applies in particular if the backlinks are from authority websites such as those with .edu and .gov sites. So, include outbound links in your content. Just don’t overdo it.

8) Write long content

Although painstaking as it is, long-form content tends to perform well on search engines. The average content length of the top 10 results differs from the number one position down to the number ten. We are talking about content length of between 2,000 and 2,500 words. Aim to publish content with 1,000 words and above.

9) Add multimedia in the content

Texts are not enough, however. Put some perspective into your content by adding images, videos, graphs, audios, graphics, etc. These elements can also help your reader understand what you are trying to discuss better.

10) Put social sharing buttons

Social signals are also an important ranking signal. These signals highlight the authenticity of your website. Volumes of social signals mean higher engagement on the content of your site. With this, though, you must have content that is worth sharing across the users’ social profiles.

While others would say that these are not so secret SEO techniques, unfortunately, some SEOs – even those working in agencies – are not aware of these things. Now that you know these, it’s time to check your content if these things exist or not. If not, integrate them now, and you should see some good results in one to three month’s time.

Some people painted SEO as a tedious job. Well, it is. On the other end, don’t believe the skeptics when they tell you that there’s no way around it. If it is, then no SEO company would thrive. The fact is, there are certain aspects of it that you must also know about. Again, website owners must be aware of all these things too!