TOP 13 Featured SEO Criteria From Semalt In 2022
New studies are constantly being added to those already needed to rank higher in search engines. With each passing year, we see new SEO criteria that need to be added to existing work. In this article, we have compiled the prominent SEO criteria for you. If you want to do more than the criteria we have listed here, you can get the support of an SEO agency like Semalt.
1. Optimize site speed
We all know how much the mobile experience has come to the fore. Today, where mobile users are more than desktop users, site speed is one of the most important criteria for Google. Google puts site speed at the forefront of almost all of its periodic updates and statements. This means that websites that open slowly are consequently thrown into the background. You can use Semalt SEO Analysis Tools to check the loading speed of your website. With these tools, you can better analyze how your site speed is seen by Google.
2. Post high-quality content
There are many SEO criteria you can evaluate to ensure your success in search engines. Criteria that you meet correctly will increase the visibility of your site, and pages that are SEO friendly and whose quality you increase will bring you traffic.
The correct structure and organization of content (title, meta, articles, images, and sub-headings) will help you rank higher on search engine results pages. If you do not have a team to produce high-quality content, working with a content agency to get content support can contribute more.
3. Focus on users' search intent
Google always states that it prefers to provide user-oriented content with a clear and concise statement. In other words, producing content that is not user-oriented but search engine-oriented would be a big mistake today. Users who visit your page will leave it if they cannot find the information they are looking for. Even if Google, which cares about user actions, considers your content to be of high quality, it will not be possible for you to rise in the rankings or maintain your position over time unless the information the user is looking for is included in the content.
4. Perform keyword analysis
Every website has a specific target audience. By making the right keyword planning for the user-oriented content, you can get a better ranking on the search engine results pages. In every new piece of content you prepare, you need to place the keywords correctly by doing search volume fiction. You can take a look at the suggestions below when doing keyword optimization.
- Use an SEO keyword analysis tool like the Dedicated Seo Dashboard to find the best keywords for your domain
- Build sentences that will arouse interest according to the target keywords in the titles
- Include words in the meta descriptions that contain the main keyword and encourage reading the content
- Making choices based on keywords in the image alt text
- Linking pages with the right words in anchor text
- Using LSI keywords
- Avoiding excessive use of unnecessary keywords
- Using keywords and their variations in subheadings
- Using as many keywords as possible in the URL
5. Pay attention to the title choices
The importance of the titles (H tags) you use while preparing content is more valuable in 2022 than before. It seems that Google will soon make available the tab bar area, which it continues to demo work in the global. The tab bar area allows us to take up more space in the search engine results pages. In the tab bar area we mentioned, 3 options appear in front of the users and the titles shown come from the H titles in the content. This means that we can get more traffic by using the subheadings in the article content in a short (30 characters or less) and effective way.
At the same time, Google or other search engines make use of H headings and the hierarchy of H headings when determining rankings, so H headings should contain keywords and create headings to summarize the paragraph.
6. Focus on unique content
If you want to rank higher on search engine results pages, you must have organic content. The information you have provided, the content setup and sentence structures, the length of the content and paragraphs, the number of paragraphs, the hierarchy of H tags, and the selection of titles are the prominent criteria that you should pay attention to.
At the same time, you should work hard to produce unique content and stay away from duplicate ones. The content prepared with translation tools can be detected by search engines to a large extent. Preparing content that is very close to each other on different pages may also cause you to lose your place in the ranking or to be penalized by search engines.
7. Care about reliability and expertise
The references you provide, the content you prepare, the keywords you choose carefully, and the satisfactory information you provide to users are generally not sustainable, which raises the issue of competence. You can take a step towards reliability by including contact information on your site and content that satisfies you when you prepare it. At the same time, you can share your areas of expertise with readers by preparing a footprint and highlighting people and tasks. Sharing this information will have a positive impact on both readers and search engines.
8. Prepare quality and fresh topics that differ
If the content you prepare is an article that can be written by anyone, it is not easy to make it stand out among similar ones. Million of pages with this or that content are shared every day, and we can see similar topics on different sites. You need to be different in order to attract attention and reach more audiences, that is, to stand out from them.
You can strengthen your content by sharing the areas where your users will interact. You can achieve this with articles, popular quotes from different sources, videos, images, extra information fields that support the subject, etc. These fields that you will add between the texts will also make it easier for search engine bots to make sense of your site.
Although the content you share continues to exist as long as your site is active, it is necessary to go back from time to time to check the validity of the information and whether there is a need for updating. You should keep your content fresh by renewing the parts that need attention, such as the activity of the informative links provided or the redirects to more up-to-date pages, the dates in the information provided, and whether the content is still up-to-date on its own.
9. Satisfy your visitors
It is very important that the readers who come to your site from the search engine results page reach the information they are looking for directly, that is, they shall be satisfied. As we mentioned above, you should prepare content suitable for users' search intent. This is because there are different criteria, such as the bounce rate, the number of pages visited, the total visit time, etc… that search engines measure and pay attention to when determining content quality. It is important how the content you prepare receives a reaction from the readers.
10. Consider the strength of links
When many people think of links, the first thing that comes to mind is backlinks. Another type of linking that is as important as the backlinks you receive is your internal linking. When you build it right, you can see its contribution in a short time.Choosing the correct links in the header and footer is a critical point for the links you make within a site. At the same time, you will see the positive benefits of the links you will give from your strong pages to different pages on your site. In addition, the effective use of the bars on the right or left side of the text area on your site is also an important detail.
Mentioning you on other sites and links to your site are followed and given importance by search engines. The more relevant the links to your site are, the stronger your reputation will be in search engines. Not every link given to your site is positive, you need to clean up the linking sites that are not directly or indirectly related to you. You can detect the links to your site through the Google Search Console or with SEO tools such as the Dedicated Seo Dashboard.
11. Pay attention to the click-through rate (CTR)
CTR, which is the abbreviation of Click Through Rate, is as important in terms of SEO as it is in advertisements. It is known that how much attention you attract with the title and meta description when you appear in search results -that is how relevant users see it- is effective in search engine ranking scoring.
12. Give importance to mobile
In this process, which started with the widespread use of mobile devices and continues, it is not enough for your site to be compatible only with desktops, because more than half of the searches are made on mobile devices. This means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, you cannot create the right experience for users, and you print negative points in the eyes of search engines.
For this reason, you should make sure that all the pages on your site are mobile-friendly. Test them periodically on different types of mobile devices and make sure that they work correctly. If the mobile user experience is at a successful level, you can expect it to have a positive impact on rankings. You can find out if your site is mobile-friendly with the Mobile-Friendly Test.
13. Optimise your voice search function
Voice search, which is emerging as one of the opportunities that technological developments offer us, has now reached a position of preference by many users. With the help of assistants such as Google Assistant supported by the operating system, it is much easier and faster to search the search engines by voice instead of typing to reach the information we need. You can optimize your site for voice calls by using Speakable structured data markup.
If you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our Semalt blog.
