You carefully craft a well-written blog post, choose a perfect keyword, optimize it for the search engines, and share it on social media. What should happen is that your post starts ranking on the first page of Google. What actually happens — many times — is that your post lags behind on the second, third, or fourth page of Google. Being on the fourth page isn’t much different than being on the tenth page, but don’t despair! If Google likes your post enough to put it on the second page, it won’t take much more for them to put it on the first. There are many on-site and off-site search engine optimization techniques that you can use to boost that post’s rankings. Let’s get into them.
Start Building Backlinks
Sometimes, backlinks are all it takes to push a post to the first page of Google. Of course, we’re talking about high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites. Start doing some outreach and link building — write guest posts, create infographics and share them — whatever it takes to get those precious backlinks.
Republish Your Content
Republishing old content is a surefire way to boost its rankings. Look around your site for old content that is ranking on the second or third page of Google. Redo those posts. Add new sections and information, embed new images and videos — basically, just make it many times better. Then, edit the published date, which is easy to do on WordPress. This will tell Google that it’s a “new” post, and it will also be bumped to the top of your blogroll. Remember to remind your social media fans and email subscribers about your new updated post.
Create Internal Links From High Rankings Posts
Although backlinks from external sites are crucial for gaining high rankings, never underestimate the power of internal links. Internal links give your site structure and help Google understand and rank your content.
If you have a post that isn’t ranking as high as you want it to, consider linking to it from other pages on your site. Link from a page that talks about a similar topic and has similar keywords. You also want the page you’re linking from to be one that is already ranking high. Doing this will transfer over some of the link juice to your new post.
Tweak Your Meta Title and Description
If you’re not ranking high enough, it could be that your article is not getting a good click through rate. Search engine rankings are directly correlated to your click through rate; the more that people click on your article when it appears in the SERPs, the higher it will climb in the SERPs. This is because when more people click on your article over the article that’s been outranking you, it tells Google that YOUR article, in fact, is the better choice and should appear first.
To increase your CTR, try tweaking your meta title and description. Meta titles are best when they’re not longer than 60-65 characters, though this will depend on whether you want your site title to appear in it or not.
Your meta title should be eye-catching, intriguing, and make a bold statement. Your meta description should make the viewer want to know more. Test various titles and descriptions to see how it affects your CTR (you can see your CTR in your Google Search Console analytics).
Improve LSI Content
LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, is how Google knows what exactly a certain keyword means, even if it has two meanings — for example, “apple” can mean both a fruit or a company. Based on keywords in the content around it, Google can understand what you’re talking about and rank you accordingly. So if you’re talking about a fruit, include keywords such as nutrients, health, and eat. If you’re talking about the company, include keywords such as iPad, Steve Jobs, and apps. Improve the LSI content of an existing post by helping Google understand what you’re talking about.
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