If you think you have finally made it in business through proper SEO marketing and can now take a break, think again. This industry never rests, and change is the only constant you can count on. It is for this very reason you should solve your existing SEO problems as soon as they come up.
But in most cases, that is easier said than done, since you might not know where to begin, or what approach to take. But today, you will master some proven SEO hacks that you can use to enhance your social signals.
Before we go any further, understand that you have to take a long term view of things in this regard, applying these strategies over time so that your SEO ranking improves steadily. Here are the 4 powerful and extensively tested SEO hacks that will supercharge your social signals.
Improve Your Social Signals Using these Hacks
1. Find out what’s causing drops in traffic
While it’s true that every site goes through drops in traffic, it does not mean you should not concern yourself too much about the problem.
Make an effort to find out why your site’s traffic has gone down. If you are wondering how you are going to do this, here are some ideas.
The first step is to monitor the changes you have introduced to your site over the period your site has seen traffic dips. If you are a large online outfit, you could even put this list of changes, on Google Docs and then use Google Analytics to make annotations to it.
This process should reveal what changes to your site might have caused your site’s SEO to drop.
Additionally, make sure that you actually have a drop in traffic, not an analytics issue. Errors in tracking your traffic could lead you to think your rankings have dropped when you haven’t. You do this by confirming that your analytics is properly installed.
Once you have noted that your analytics are in order, dig deeper and look at top keywords, top browsers, top search engines, top locations, top devices, and top languages to identify where the loss in traffic might have come from.
Another thing you should look into with regard to your dropping traffic is your webmaster tools. This could help you find out if you have gotten any penalty from Google due to alert messages in Google Search Console.
In case you have a penalty, you should correct the related issues and re-submit your site. Some issues that might pop up here include duplicate content and links that have been blocked by robots.txt among other issues.
From there, look into the visibility of your keywords on ranking tools such as SEM Rush and Search Metrics among others. These tools can help you see what the problem with your traffic might be.
A third-party tool can also be used to conduct link analysis so that you can see if you have any penalties or negative SEO from fake social media profiles trolling your business, or anchor texts that would be considered spam.
2. Optimize your site through social media and other tools
As far as SEO goes, social proof has never been more important than it is today. For instance, Google recently got access to Twitter data, and that means that your tweets, likes and so forth will have a greater impact on your SEO rankings.
Facebook falls under the same category, despite not having a similar arrangement with Google, which should be obvious given its enormous user base. Another social media platform to consider is Google+.
So, signals from these sites can have a profound impact on your search engine rankings. Google will consider them in addition to other factors when ranking your site.
Therefore, you should not only work on ensuring that your site has a great presence on social media sites but also ensure that its presence on such sites is positive and to your benefit as far as SEO goes. But all things considered, this responsibility is bigger than most businesses imagine.
For instance, social media content needs to be of high quality, and you have to reach as many people as possible. This should involve having your tweets “retweeted”, your Facebook posts “shared” so that more people can be exposed to your brand.
Also, great social media presence can get your friends and followers, and this can greatly enhance your search engine rankings. With such people linking to you, Google will see you as being more legitimate. People who land on your social media site will also feel more confident in using your services when they discover that you have many followers or friends.
This should draw more traffic to your site, and help keep your rankings high. But to achieve all these social media benefits, quite a bit of expertise is needed. Social Proof provides these services to companies at fair prices while still making quality services a priority.
In addition, working on social proof by building quality social signals, you should also use hashtags in your posts, and also add keywords to your posts when sharing content. These can have a huge impact on sites like Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.
You can also reach to possible influences. Basically, these are people who rank highly on social media platforms for certain keywords and are not competing against your business. When such individuals share your content, your business can get more credibility and reach a broader market.
Aside from social media, you can improve your rankings by linking to sites that offer similar content, recycling and repurposing great content, and taking part in forums like Yahoo Answers, Reddit, and even Quora.
3. Increase your page loading speeds
Your site will rank better when your pages load much faster. It is especially important to ensure that your pages load fast all the time, especially as your site grows because the addition of more content might affect the speed at which its pages load. This is especially so for video content and images.
To see how your site is currently doing, you can always use Google’s Page Speed tool or something similar to find out at what speeds your pages are currently loaded. And even if you find out that your site is doing fine in this regard, you should make further tests every once in a while to ensure everything is in perfect working order.
As a rule, you should check your speeds after every change you make to your site with regard to adding more content.
Otherwise, if you discover that your site is not as fast as it needs to be; there are some things you can do to remedy the situation. Some steps you can take include optimizing your images to keep them under 100 kbs. Large image files can really affect your site’s speed. A great trick is to use jpg files whenever that is an option. But if you feel optimizing the images might ruin their quality, you can always use image compression to shrink the images you have.
While on the subject, you can also compress CSS, HTML, and JavaScript codes. There are online tools that can help you out with this. Experts can also help in this regard so that you have a site that loads much faster.
Outdated plugins can also have a negative impact on your speed. You should get rid of them as they just serve to slow down your site and even expose it to security risks. Deactivating them is not enough, make sure they are completely gone.
Your site’s speed can also improve considerably when you reduce the number of redirects on your site. So, keep the redirects to a minimum, and your site will run much faster.
4. Rename content files
You should give your content files names that include keywords and other descriptive information. Giving your files specific and descriptive names will make them have a better impact on your Google rankings.
It is also great for your users as well. For instance, if you are sharing an ebook, you will have a better impact on your users if the file has a specific name on it. The name can even act as a motivation for people who would otherwise not click on it make a download.
While at it, ensure that your brand is part of the content file’s name so as to grow its influence further. People are more likely to click on your content when you have descriptive names on them, including a keyword.
So, even as you share that video on social media or an image, make sure you give it a unique name that will generate greater interest among your target audience.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you should not expect to improve your social signals in one go. But with dedication, targeted effort, and patience, you will start to see significant results within a short span of time.
Even if your SEO is pretty good, there is always something you can do to make it better or at least keep your rankings from slipping. With above hacks, this should hardly be an issue. Put them to the test and see the results for yourself; you will not be disappointed.
