Does your website have all the best keywords? Does it have quality backlinks from websites that cover the same or a related topic? Is it fast, mobile-friendly, good content, and frequent updates? Good, it means that you checked off most must-dos from your list. But how about the others? There are things beyond doing your keyword research and optimizing the internal linking that you can do to improve your rankings – and most people forget about them.
Structured Data
One of the things most people forget about when doing their on-page SEO is telling the search engines – not the readers – what their content actually is about. You see, search engines don’t understand content as you and me, and can’t decide based on the text whether your blog post is a book review or a recipe for hummus. But you can tell them using structured data.
Structured data is a format for classifying the web page content. For example, it tells the search engine that the page it just found is a news article written by a certain journalist or a review of the Spin online casino. To make things better, it also tells the search engine how to display the page in the results. To stick with the above example, here is a search result for “spin casino review” on Google that uses structured data to tell Google that it’s a review:
Structured data will almost certainly improve your site’s search appearance by displaying rich results – see the “Rating” above.
There are several structured data schemas for various types of content published on the web, covering everything from movie reviews (where you can list everything from a movie’s country of origin to the composer of its soundtrack) to technology articles (where you can specify the prerequisites and proficiency level needed to perform a certain action described in it).
And the best part about it is that all major search engines – Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo – support it. For more information about structured data schemas, documentation, and usage examples, head over to schema.org.
Proper internal linking
Incoming links give your site the much-needed “link juice”. Internal links, in turn, distribute the link juice to your site’s pages. While proper internal linking is not a direct ranking factor, it does strengthen the “overall search-optimized value” of a website, as Neil Patel put it.
First and foremost, you need to create a lot of content – linkable content – and a web of links between all the pieces of content you create.
Not just any links, mind you – the links need to be natural, relevant and helpful.
Not over-optimized, keyword-stuffed links – keep them natural, descriptive, and helpful.
And don’t be afraid to link the bowels of your site.
And most importantly, keep your internal links at a level that’s helpful to the user.
Proper, consistent internal linking may not earn positions in the search results but it will certainly offer a more useful experience for your visitors and will likely convince search engines to take a better, in-depth look at your website.
Refreshing old content
Constantly adding fresh content to your site is vital. Updating old, “evergreen” content can, in turn, will almost certainly improve your site’s visibility. Some have even called it “the secret weapon” that too few SEOs use.
Updating old articles improves their “freshness”, a ranking factor used by Google, among others. Plus, the new date shown in the search results may convince more potential visitors to choose your site instead of another that’s constantly churning out fresh articles on a certain topic. Finally, this can put old content that was already successful once back on the map and at a cost way smaller than producing something new.
Ellen Holington