Turbo Charge Your SEO with These 5 Advanced Techniques

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By Boris Dzhingarov

Search engines are getting smarter in how they crawl and rank websites. As search engines introduce newer, smarter algorithms, websites need to improve alongside those algorithms in order to stay ahead. The changes made to search engine algorithms is one of the reasons why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is never a one-time thing.

With the digital marketing landscape becoming more competitive, relying on older SEO tactics is no longer the way to go. While you still need to cover the basics and optimize your website and pages for SEO, you want to incorporate advanced techniques in order to lead and rank higher. These top fiveadvanced techniques are the ones you need to use to turbo-charge your SEO.

Optimize for Intent

We are so used to static website structure or sitemaps based on how the content is organized. There is nothing wrong with this approach; you can still rank high when the site is structured for maximum convenience and positive user experience.

You can, however, take it a step further and organize your site based on search intent. Users go to search engines for different reasons. Their search intent shows the kind of information they are looking for and how they perform the actual search.

For example, users looking for informational content will use different keywords than those with the intent to buy something. Keywords and search queries used for different intents also differ, and those keywords can be used to optimize your site as a whole.

By taking intent into account, you can optimize landing pages differently. A product landing page can represent commercial-related keywords to cater to users who are looking to buy your products, while your Blog section can cater to users seeking valuable information.

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Go Long

The days of writing short posts and trying to update the site several times a day are certainly gone. Now that metrics like Time on Site are used to measure user experience, long-form content is the new champion.

You want to provide your viewers with in-depth articles on a specific topic in order to maximize the value of your articles. When the articles are interesting and valuable, the chances of users spending more time on your site becomes higher.

Recent studies have shown that the average length of popular and effective posts is now around 1,000 words. That said, you also have to make sure that the articles are well-written and of high quality. Producing content is now a matter of balancing quality and quantity.

Snackable content finds its places on social media. You can utilize shorter content to engage your social media audience directly. That actually brings us to our next advanced technique.

Leverage Social Media

If you think social media shares have no impact on your site’s SEO performance, think again. They may not be measurable as backlinks, but social media shares – especially when they come from the audience directly – still provide a substantial boost to your SEO performance.

Google and other search engines aren’t displaying every social media share they crawl, but those shares are used to measure the quality and value of your content. The more people share your content, the more valuable that content is.

Social media is also the perfect place to engage the audience directly. As mentioned before, you can share shorter forms of your content to get more viewers interested. Don’t hesitate to spend time replying to users or asking questions to get them more engaged.

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This is a great way to generate return visits. Recurring users suggest positive user experience too, making return visits one of the most valuable SEO metrics to pursue today. Besides, building a strong audience base is never a bad idea.

Keep Your Site Clean

Our next SEO technique is actually pretty simple to implement: keep spam comments away from your pages. As crazy as this may sound, many site owners actually choose to leave spam comments on their pages for the sake of inflated Comments numbers.

Spam comments can hurt your site’s SEO performance in different ways. Even when the URLs included in the comments are marked no-follow, search engines can still mistakenly pass link authority to those pages. You actually lose SEO performance in this case.

There is also the fact that removing spam comments is easier than you think. Plugins like Akismet automate the process of eliminating spam comments to a certain degree. You can remove spam comments that weren’t automatically filtered manually.

It is also a good idea to make commenting difficult. Requiring a valid name and email address is no longer enough. You have to consider adding a Captcha or moderating first-time comments in order to keep your pages free of spam.

Measure Yourself

Last but not least, make monitoring SEO performance a habit. You can gather a lot of insights and learn about the performance of your site when you constantly monitor its SEO performance. There is no shortage of monitoring tools to use either.

You can automate most of the monitoring and analysis process thanks to tools like SE Ranking and Moz. You also have the option to do your own data analysis based on what is captured by Google Analytics. It is easy to identify the things you do right when you have multiple data sources.

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In fact, you can take SEO monitoring – and optimization in general – a step further by enlisting the help of artificial intelligence. AI in SEO is not uncommon. Tools like Alli AI have long been utilizing AI to automate data processing, keyword analysis, and other tasks.

What you don’t want to do is use too many free monitoring tools that don’t really bring value to the campaign. You’ll end up with conflicting data and insights you cannot really act on. You also want to avoid not taking any steps to refine your SEO campaign when refinements are clearly needed.

These 5 tips are all actionable and can be implemented right away. If you are seeking for ways to turbo-charge your SEO campaign, optimizing for intent, leveraging social media, and doing some serious monitoring and refinement should all be at the top of your priority list.