One of the advantages of SEO (search engine optimization) is that it works nicely alongside your other content marketing strategies, such as blogging. In other words, as long as you’re already creating content, you might as well optimize it to attract traffic from the search engines.
Check out these 17 tips and insights for doing exactly that…
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1. Understanding What Search Engines Want
In the not-too-distant past, people simply filled their content with keywords, which helped them get found whenever someone inputted those keywords in a search engine. Today that sort of tactic would get you penalized.
In order to optimize your pages for the search engines, you need to understand what they want. Namely, they want to provide a good experience for their visitors. To that end, you need to create your content (and your pages as whole) for your humans FIRST. Secondarily you should do things like include keywords if (and only if) you can do it naturally, without hindering the human’s good experience.
Keep that in mind as you read the rest of these tips…
2. Give Google Fresh Content
One of your priorities should be to publish fresh content regularly (such as weekly), as Google tends to favor newer content over older content (with all else being equal). Publishing frequently also keeps the search engines coming back to your site and crawling it often.
3. Create In-Depth Content
Google prefers long content over short content, which is why you’ll want to regularly publish in-depth articles and other information.
Now here’s the catch: your readers don’t always have the time to go through a 1500-word article. That’s why you’ll want to format your content so that skimmers can quickly get the gist of your article. This means highlighting important text with bolding, headlines, italics, bulleted list, graphical captions, and similar emphasis.
Take this guide as an example: you can skim down the 17 bolded points to get an overall idea of the guide’s highlights.
4. How to Research Your Keywords
Your first step is to determine what sort of words your audience is inputting into the search engines so that you can include these keywords naturally into your web pages.
In order to uncover these keywords, you can use a keyword tool of your choice. Examples include WordTracker.com, MarketSamurai.com, and WordRecon.com.
Aim for longtail keywords. These are keywords that don’t get a lot of volume, but they also don’t have a lot of competition. Even better, they tend to be very targeted.
For example, “weight loss” is very competitive, yet it’s not clear what someone wants. A better keyword would be something like, “weight loss tips for women over 40.” This word is more specific, which generates a higher quality traffic.
5. 7 Places to Insert Your Keywords
Once you know what words to include in your web pages, then insert the only when you can do so naturally. Here are places to include them:
- Article title.
- Body of the article.
- Page title.
- The URL.
- Meta description for the page.
- Alt-text for images.
- Navigation menu.
Next…
6. Create Topic Clusters On Your Blog
One search-engine-friendly way to organize the content on your blog is by creating topic clusters. This is where you have an in-depth pillar post on a broad topic (typically a high-volume keyword), and then you create several related articles based on low-volume keywords. You then link these topic clusters together, typically with a “wheel and spoke” linking structure.
For example, if your pillar content is about how to train a puppy, then your subtopics might include how to housetrain a puppy, how to socialize a puppy, how to curb specific problem behaviors (such as inappropriate chewing), various articles on obedience training (e.g., teaching the puppy to “sit”) and so on.
Which brings us to the next point…
7. How and When to Link Internally
Whenever you create topic clusters, you should link the relevant content together. For example, the subtopics should all be linked to the pillar post. In addition, any related subtopics should be linked to each other, where appropriate.
Let’s go back to the puppy training example. If you had a post about teaching a dog “down” (lay down), you might mention that it’s sometimes easier to teach this command from a “sit” position. You can then link to your article on how to teach a puppy to sit.
8. Which SEO Plugin to Install
If you’re using a content management system like WordPress (WP), then have the option of installing a plugin that helps you optimize your site for the search engines. If you run a search for SEO plugins, you’ll find that you have a lot of options.
Here’s the one I recommend: the Yoast SEO plugin, which you can find at https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/.
This plugin will help you analyze your content in terms of readability and SEO so that you can write SEO-friendly text, it will help you create a sitemap, and it helps you with your linking structure. In short, it fine-tunes your WP blog to be as search-engine-friendly as possible.
9. How to Get External Links
Google likes to see other high-quality sites linking to you, because it’s like getting a “vote” from another site. The more “votes” you get from established authority sites, the more favorably Google will rank your pages.
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The key to this strategy is to naturally acquire links from high-quality sites. If you get links from low-quality sites, they won’t do anything positive for your rankings. That’s because people used to buy links from link farms and other questionable “bad neighborhoods” online. Now when Google sees this sort of behavior, they ignore the links at best or penalize your site at worst.
So, how do you get high-quality links from established authority sites?
One example: you might create viral content that other sites link to. Or you might do an interview with an authority site in your niche, which results in a link back.
Point is, don’t buy or swap links, as these are going to be low-quality links. Instead, acquire them naturally by focusing on creating unique, high-quality and practical information that your people in your niche are sure to love.
10. Create a Responsive Website
As mentioned earlier, Google’s goal is to give their visitors a really good experience. Since so many people search online using phones, tablets and other devices, part of providing a great experience is to create a mobile-friendly blog. This includes the following:
- Install a responsive theme. This is a theme that automatically adjusts to give the visitor the best experience based on the device they’re using. For example, images will adjust to fit the screen, whether that screen is a phone or a big desktop.
- Space links out. It’s hard for people on phones and other small devices to tap on a link if that link is near another link. As such, you can make your blog more mobile-friendly by spacing out links so they’re easier to tap.
Here’s a related tip…
11. Design an Accessible Website
Another way to provide a great experience for visitors (and boost your SEO rankings) is to make sure your site is accessible to everyone, including those who are disabled. This includes people with visual, auditory, cognitive and physical (motor) impairments.
For example, people who are blind or have low vision often visit websites using assistive devices such as screen readers. You need to be sure that your website coding is readable and accessible to those using these devices.
Another example: people with motor issues may be unable to use a mouse to navigate your site, so they use their keyboard instead. If they can’t reach every part using only their keyboard, then your site isn’t accessible.
Where to start? Get an accessibility audit so that you know which parts of your site need improvement. Many web development companies offer these audits at low cost or even for free.
12. Be Sure Your Site Loads Quickly
Still another SEO factor is how quickly your site loads. Slowly loading sites tend to get ranked lower in the search engines, which is why you want to optimize your page speed.
Again, a good place to start is by doing page-speed audit. There you’ll be able to uncover issues such as images that aren’t optimized, bloated code that’s slowing down the site, scripts that are running when they shouldn’t be, and similar.
13. Use Minimal Topics/Categories
If you’re like most blog owners, then you may create categories on the fly, as needed. What happens is you end up creating categories that are very similar to each other, meaning that you have many of the same articles appearing in those categories. Problem is, this creates duplicate content when WordPress creates a page listing all topics in a category, and Google doesn’t like duplicate content.
Here’s what to do instead: plan out your categories ahead of time, and be sure they’re not too similar to each other (so that you don’t have the same articles in each category).
For example, a copywriting blog with topic categories of “Sales Triggers” and “Psychological Triggers” are too similar. Pick one and discard the other to avoid duplicate pages.
14. Create a Google-Friendly Linking Structure
Another thing you’ll want to plan is how to create an SEO-friendly linking structure. One way to do this is have your main topic AND the keywords of the subtopic as part of the URL. Like this: YourDomain.com/Main-Topic/Keywords-Subtopic
Let me give you an example:
YourDomain.com/Social-Media-Marketing/Start-Facebook-Group
15. Link to Other Relevant Websites
As you know, you should be linking articles internally to related pages on your site. Another thing you’ll want to do is link to other relevant pages on other peoples’ websites. That’s because linking to relevant, high-quality content provides extra value to your visitors. As you know by now, Google’s goal is to provide a good experience for their searchers, and providing this sort of value is one way to create a good experience and help win Google’s favor. Just be sure to use this strategy sparingly, as you don’t want to send your visitors away to other sites.
16. 3 SEO Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make
Get (and keep) your good rankings by avoiding these mistakes:
Stuffing Keywords
More is NOT better when it comes to including your keywords in a blog post. In fact, Google will consider this spamming and penalize your page (or site as a whole). That’s why you’ll want to include your keywords in a natural way (i.e., sparingly), one that provides a good experience for readers.
Acquiring Links Quickly
If you get inbound links fast, Google will suspect you’re buying them, swapping them, or acquiring them through other artificial means. Focus on getting links naturally as discussed above.
Hiring a Questionable SEO Company
If an SEO company promises you #1 rankings in a short amount of time, walk away. Chances are, they’re going to get your site ranked for a keyword that no one cares about. If you outsource SEO, give your business to a company whose team is realistic about SEO.
17. Keep Yourself Updated
The SEO landscape is constantly changing, and the average business owner finds it difficult to keep up with these changes. That’s why you’ll want to stay updated and informed by following experts who make it their business to keep abreast of these changes. Here’s one such site: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/.
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Conclusion
While it can take time to start getting good results from your search engine optimization efforts, it’s well worth the investment. That’s because your efforts can bring traffic to you for many months (or longer), especially if you work to maintain your rankings. And if you focus on longtail keywords, then you’ll see a lot of high-quality, targeted traffic coming in.
To that end, be sure to put these 17 tips to use ASAP to start bringing Google traffic to your site!
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