Most people who do business online understand that SEO helps potential customers find their website. They might even realize how the proper use of keywords can boost their ranking in search engine results pages. Still, SEO includes wide-ranging concepts that can become detailed or complex as a website owner desires. The following five SEO techniques include some powerful and obscure SEO techniques of which most people have never heard.

Schema

A search engine industry effort called Schema provides tags and guidance webmasters can use to make their website more accessible to search engines. Using a special microdata format, webmasters can add information to their HTML content that will place them in relevant search engine results pages. Conforming website code to the recommendations found at Schema.org can produce some of the best SEO improvements in the shortest time.

Author Reputation

Google can boost the search engine exposure of a site by including authors’ content along with their Google profile. This generally boosts traffic to a destination site because it shows that a page author has a strong reputation online. It also encourages visitors to explore links to content found inside an author’s profile. To make Google display the author’s profile, developers must add special authorship markup code to their pages.

Affiliate Link Cloaking

Many website owners join affiliate sales programs that help them earn money either for income or to defray operating costs. Some website owners do not know that Google will often decrease the standing of webpages that contain links to affiliates. The search engine thinks that sites that attempt to earn money have less-valuable content than ad-free sites. By using 301 redirects or HTML and PHP redirection files, only local links reside on content pages, improving their appeal to search engines and to visitors.

Page Speed Matters

Not too long ago, Google began determining how long a browser needs to load a page. Pages that take more time to load than Google deems appropriate go down in the search results while faster pages move upward. A free Google tool called Page Speed Online can help webmasters learn how to improve the speed of their pages. Other online tools can also help designers build websites that build search engine rank through better speed. Caution: Google will often recommend webmasters to limit redirects, but doing so may eliminate non-Google advertising.

Add Trust Indicators

Search engines value content that users can trust, so it attempts to determine the trustworthiness of a website by looking for privacy policies, disclaimers and about pages. Adding these pages and optimizing them for Google and the other search engines will deliver more traffic by way of search engine standing.

Though uncommon, the SEO techniques mentioned here will help webmasters take their SEO campaigns to the next level. While studying these techniques, they should keep their eyes open for other little-known tactics.

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