12 PRACTICAL SEO TIPS TO INCREASE ORGANIC TRAFFIC

SEO may seem complex at first glance. However, it is actually a discipline that everyone can understand. It involves editorial, graphic, technical and sometimes even interpersonal skills.

In other words, SEO is understandable to everyone if they are interested in it.

Today we are going to look at 12 practices that anyone can use to increase their organic traffic.

This article was written by Antoine Veyrieres, manager of the Monkey agency. You can find new articles from him every Monday morning on his SEO blog

1 – Have a UX / UI friendly site

The first tip is to work on the design and user experience of your site. This may seem “logical”, but it is essential to maximize the SEO actions listed in the rest of this article.

Here are some tips to make a site as nice as possible:

• In web design: less is more. Do not try to integrate all kinds of colors, fonts or animations into the pages of a website. The simpler it is, the more fluid the navigation will be;
• Two colors, one primary and one secondary, are already enough in the first instance.

Good design and a good user experience are the first components of a long-term successful SEO strategy. It’s a shame to start working on your SEO until these two aspects are perfectly on your site

Good UX and UI design will multiply the impact of SEO optimizations in the long run. Therefore, it is a good idea to be patient and resolve these issues before embarking on an SEO strategy.

2 – Improve the loading time on the mobile

The pages of a website are crawled by Googlebot for mobile. The faster the site loads, the easier the navigation will be for the Googlebot. To improve the loading time of your mobile site it is important to work on:

• The weight of the images ;
• JavaScript;
• CSS;
• Accommodation ;
• DNS;
• animations

Load time, also known as the speed of a website, has a huge impact on its ranking. A few years ago, Google promoted the AMP format , which allows removing, in this version, all css and javascript resources

The goal is that anyone can visit a web page from anywhere, such as on public transport. Google’s strategy for its search engine focuses on mobile navigation

However, a mobile user will not necessarily have access to WIFI. Although 4G, soon 5G, is fairly well democratized in big cities, the creation of a fast mobile site will allow the user to access it from anywhere

3 – Incorporate SEO tags on the page

There are HTML tags that tell Google which keywords a page should rank for. Therefore, it is essential to use them without moderation by embedding the target query in each of them:

• Meta Title tags;
• Meta Description tags;
• Labels Hn ;
• Strong labels (to a lesser extent).

SEO tags are of the utmost importance. Without SEO tags, it will be very difficult for a site to rank for relevant keywords.

By using these tags, the developer makes Google’s job easier. And if we take into account the number of pages that Googlebot has to explore every day, it is understandable that the slightest gift for him has a great impact on the natural referencing of the website in question.

4 – Use the right keywords

In addition to HTML tags, a page must be semantically optimized. In other words, it must respond as best as possible to the user’s search intention. To do this, nothing better than browsing the SERPs and the sites positioned on the target words

It will be necessary to identify:

• The semantic field of the target query;
• Recurring questions related to the target query.

Google’s SEO algorithm is opaque and confidential. It is important that a search engine does not reveal its operation to avoid being manipulated by SEOs

However, Google uses hundreds of different factors to rank pages in its search engine. And among them, it is clear that the semantic richness of a page is important

5 – Make guest posts

Since its creation, the Google algorithm has used a fundamental principle: that of netlinking . This means that every link from another site that points to your site will transfer SEO juice to you and therefore have the impact of improving your ranking.

Guest articles are, in a way, the highest way to collect backlinks. They allow you to control your netlinking strategy from A to Z. It is possible by using guest articles to find highly relevant sites

Take the example of this article, here the SEO Monkey agency published a guest post on the Twaino blog. It would have been impossible for them to find such relevant backlinks through a link selling platform.

6 – Post regularly

Posting regularly will have several advantages for a website or blog. In the first place, it will logically allow you to position more pages and, therefore, search for more and more keywords in which to position yourself.

Secondly, this strategy together with good internal linking will improve the referencing of other existing pages. Lastly, posting regularly will force Google to visit your site more often and therefore make it easier to get indexed.

To have a high and regular posting rate, you need to surround yourself with great web copywriters who are passionate about the topic of the site at hand. It takes a day to write a 2,000-word article, and another half day for optimization and integration

7 – Optimize internal links

Internal linking has the dual benefit of transferring SEO juice between pages (and thus pushing them together), while making them easier to get indexed. Indeed, Googlebot will find it easier to explore a well-meshed site

It is important that internal linking is done according to semantics, that is, categorizing the pages of a site to link them together.

Also, internal links should not be viewed solely as a tool to make it easier for Googlebot to navigate your site. A good internal link should allow your visitor to wander around your site

Therefore, you should not view internal linking only in terms of hyperlinks. A good internal link involves the call to action (CTA) of the pages of a website. Google knows this and places a lot of importance on a link from a call to action button.

8 – Set up an SEO reporting tool

It is about setting goals to achieve. An SEO reporting tool should allow the user to see month-to-month progress on target queries. Of course, the reporting tool should also allow the user to track overall organic traffic progress (impressions, clicks, click-through rates, conversions)

Used correctly, this tool should allow the webmaster to adjust the view regularly and adopt a surgical SEO strategy to maximize organic results. SEO reporting can be done in many tools, the main ones being Google Data Studio or SEMrush

Therefore, a monthly SEO report is essential to achieve your SEO goals. Without this tool, SEO will go in all directions and end up going off course.

9 – Audit your site regularly

In addition to the preparation of reports, the periodic audit of a center will allow monitoring the evolution of operational KPIs

• contents ;
• technique ;
• network link ;
• and possibly social media

If a website is alive, its load time will tend to deteriorate over time, as will more global errors, which will tend to multiply, so it’s good practice to keep an eye on it

A periodic audit, say monthly, should obviously represent much less work than a complete audit carried out during a so-called one-time service

Here it is necessary to use a replicable model that allows to follow the evolution of the technique, the content and the popularity of a website. This should not be confused with an audit performed at the launch or start of an SEO strategy.

10 – Focus on quality rather than quantity

In the last 3 years, Google has really increased its demands. One developer has even indicated the use of artificial intelligence before indexing crawling, which by definition implies a second layer of indexing by an AI

Specifically, this means that Google will no longer attempt to index all sites in its search engine. Only the most relevant and the most qualitative will continue to have its place. So always favor quality over quantity

This is perhaps the most important part of this article. Quality will always take precedence over quantity in the future. And because SEO is a long-term job, you need to allow the sites that benefit from it to enjoy a long-term return on investment.

To improve the quality of your pages, you need to understand that writing content is not enough. SXO is the intersection of an SEO strategy and a UX strategy

In other words, quality will involve various skills

• Design
• web development
• Web writing
• And of course SEO

11 – Communicate on social networks

There is a debate that has been tearing SEOs apart for many years

“Will the social media post have an impact on natural referencing?

In fact, links from social networks are not taken into account by Google as they are nofollow. Therefore, they do not directly send the SEO juice to the pages of the target site.

However, it is true that making a brand known by word of mouth helps to facilitate its referencing. And what better way to spread word of mouth than through social media?

SEO is often compared to juice, flowing from page to page and site to site thanks to backlinks and internal links. It is necessary to understand that the Google robot is designed to imitate the navigation of real web visitors

So, what better way to send as many visitors as possible to a site to facilitate the work of the GoogleBot. So, in the long run, a social media strategy will have the impact of sending data to Google, making it easier for them to work on a website.

12 – Invest for the long term

“How long does SEO take?”

The most asked question by SEOs themselves. The answer is simple: a long time

And it is precisely because SEO is so long that it is the channel with the highest return on investment

If it’s on the front page tomorrow, it’ll be there for a long time. The key to a successful SEO strategy is patience. Do not judge your results, but the general trend

In addition, the age of a domain name is an important parameter in the consideration that Google makes of the referencing of a domain.

In summary

To conclude this article, I would like to focus on quality. The days of black hat SEO manipulating the Google algorithm are over. Among these 12 tips, there is none that invites this type of practice

To rank, you need to provide maximum value to your visitors while making site navigation as pleasant as possible. Likewise, making it easier for Google’s indexing bot to navigate your pages has nothing to do with any manipulation of the algorithm. It just makes it easier for Googlebot to crawl.