Uncommon On page SEO hacks to boost your rankings
In this blog we look at actionable ways to improve your SEO that you may not know. No fluff. Let’s get started.
In SEO there are two important aspects: on page and off page. On page is things you can do on the pages and off pages is where you have to pay money for backlinks and digital PR. So it makes sense to focus on on page because that is within your control.
Make content skimmable
Keep your paragraphs short. How short is short? Two to three sentences. Remember you are competing in a world of Tikok and Instagram, leading to very short attention spans. Your audience will appreciate this little optimization as a wall of text can be overwhelming when you open a page on a website to have a read of it.
Flesch-Kincaid reading level
This is not a well-known one. This is a scale that grades the “readability” of a text. It has never been confirmed as a ranking factor but in our opinion it has an effect. For example academic writing will have a higher score, nearer 60-70 than a children’s storybook of around 20-30.
Flesch-Kincaid, can indirectly improve your SEO by enhancing user experience and engagement on your website.
Think about it, if you have a gardening blog, which should be easy reading, and its reading level is Grade 12, you are going to lose readers as the complexity does not fit the target market.
Use natural language processing (NLP)
Use NLP to find important entities and related keywords for your content. This helps the search engines understand your content. You can put it into one of the many NLP tools to analyse your page and ask it for recommendations.
Avoid passive voice
Passive voice is hard to read and interpret and it’s bad grammar. Passive voice is a sentence like “The cake was ordered by the man at the cafe”, the subject (the man) and the object (the cake) are at the beginning and end of the sentence respectively. The brain has to work harder to interpret what is being said. A better, clearer way to write is “the man at the cake ordered cake”. Key signs of passive construction are “was + verb” and “by”. Scan your content and remove, remove, remove!
Ensure consistency of UK or US English
This is not something most people think about, but -ise endings to verbs are considered more British and -ize more American. This is the kind of thing that proofreaders will check, that level of nitty gritty. Mixing them up is not a symbol of good quality content, it just makes things look sloppy – you will be surprised how many people take note of an issue like this, it reflects badly on your business.
All the above tips affect SEO as they make your content easier to digest and read and therefore people spend more time on your page. Time on page is a critical ranking factor as it is an unbiased signal of how people are engaging with your content. They also naturally optimize the on page factors.
