In today’s challenging digital world, online businesses that understand the importance of top rankings and know how to achieve it have a competitive edge. However, what about the rest? Most online business owners struggle to achieve top rankings. Here are a few ways to achieve good rankings:

1. Remove too many outbound links – Use a few relevant outbound links because they pass link juice to other websites which is not a good SEO practice.
2. Image optimisation – You should optimise images by using "Alt text" (alternative text).
3. Improve page load speed – Increase the speed of your site to serve your users efficiently. (Tip - Try to minimise HTTP requests).
4. Improve your website’s usability – Improve the usability of your site by acquiring good backlinks, getting rid of duplicate content, providing an easy navigation structure and eliminating doorway pages. (Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing).
5. Use multimedia – Use images, presentations, infographics, videos and audios to enrich your users’ experience. This will decrease the overall bounce rate.
6. Fix broken links – Broken links can damage your website’s usability. So, fix them immediately before they deter the search engines. (Tip – Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Google Webmaster Tool or W3C Link Checker to check your website’s broken links).
7. Improve readability – If you want to make your content readable, you should use bullets and small paragraphs and easy to understand language. (Tip – Use Readability-Score.com to check your content’s readability).
8. Include a "contact us" page - Including a "Contact Us" page sends a signal of authenticity. You should display your complete contact details so that your customers can contact you without any problem.
9. Use social media – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media sites should be used with the utmost care as they can influence your SEO rankings.

However, your priority should always be to improve the overall understanding and experience of your users. Quick and easy Tips –

• Use graphs and infographics to display critical information.
• Use clear and catchy headlines.
• Create original, valuable and actionable content.
• Use social proof (customer testimonials or case studies) to improve your website’s credibility.
• Use the Google Webmaster Tool to check your site’s health.

  Quick facts:

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• There are 2.3 billion active social media users.
• More than 90% of visitors who read your headlines also read your CTA Copy.
• Social sharing influences purchasing behaviour.
• 86% of female shoppers say they trust product recommendations from real people.
• 61% of CMOs say search engines are an effective marketing channel.