Without a well thought out SEO strategy, no website is ever going to be able to pull in a huge amount of traffic. Over the years, the rules surrounding SEO have changed. SEO was once the purview of the black hats. It was an almost entirely illegitimate set of tactics used to artificially inflate a website’s position in search results rankings and, therefore, its overall value.

Naturally, search engine providers like Google did not take kindly to this state of affairs. That is why they have since undertaken massive efforts to root out and punish websites that try to manipulate their SEO score in an unapproved way. It is the penalties Google hands down to websites that are found to be in breach of its guidelines that means website owners must be careful of the SEO tactics that they use.

Determine Your Current Score

Before you can begin to work on seriously improving your SEO score, it will obviously help to know what your current SEO score is. There are a variety of free tools available which will help you to assess how effective your current SEO methods are. One of the most popular comes from SERPS and allows you to determine your page ranking based upon a keyword search. Once you have a better understanding of your website’s current SEO status, it will be much easier to formulate a coherent and comprehensive plan for improving your SEO score.

Improve Engagement

Engagement refers to how much your website is able to hold a visitor’s attention. The most common metric for measuring this is the amount of time, on average, that users spend on pages on your website. Officially, Google hasn’t specified whether this metric has an impact on a website’s ranking.

However, there is growing evidence which would indicate that this is indeed the case. For example, SimilarWeb has conducted research which looked at a million search results and found a positive correlation between engagement and SEO rankings.

Focus on Web Design

Far too many businesses and websites restrict their SEO by never considering how the design of their website might affect their rankings. Ensuring that your website design is as efficient as it can be is part of the process of improving engagement. It is a good idea to give your website the occasional makeover just to prevent it from becoming stale and boring to its audience. Most website owners do this anyway, but not all of them make the connection with SEO.

If your website contains a lot of features that you have coded yourself, it is worth checking your code for any opportunities to optimize it. Java Beat can help you with optimizing the code on any Java elements on your page.

Remember, user response is a big factor in determining your overall SEO score. For most websites, the key to improving formatting is to use shorter and more concise paragraphs and sentences. Don’t overcomplicate your language and try and break up your writing as much as possible. Keep your paragraphs to 3-4 sentences each. By focusing on this, along with the above tips, you can watch your website’s SEO ranking soar.

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