Do you have a business website? Are you running an online business? Well then, is it ranked on Google? If not, then that’s why you aren’t generating enough traffic. Failure to getting our sites ranked is a pretty common problem seen in this world. Therefore, as a B2C and B2B digital marketing expert, I have come up with a short guide coming from my vast experience with international B2B marketplace to provide you with website optimization tips that can increase your chances of getting ranked.
The strategy used to optimize a website is known as SEO (search engine optimization). SEO friendly sites are always more likely of getting a better rank. However, due to Google’s constant rollout of algorithm updates, you still have to be on your feet to make the necessary alterations. Yet, after going through all the updates and predictions for the year to come, I’ve come up with essential power tips to help you optimize your business website.
1. Make Sure your Site is Mobile-Ready
In March 2018, Google announced that websites that are mobile-friendly would experience an increase in the crawl rate of their website. This was called the mobile-first indexing update. This update was expected as in 2019; it is probable that around 63.4% of the world’s mobile users will access the internet through their cellphones.
After looking at the following researches, it would be a foolish step to ignore optimizing your website for mobile. Other than that, you also have to make sure that all your content is viewable in all types of screen sizes. This means that you have to focus on your image size and page layout. Remember, if you want your site to land up anywhere on the first page of Google, mobile optimization is crucial.
2. Create Exceptional Content
The algorithm updates of Google in 2018 revealed clearly how much this search engine is focusing on the quality and authority of the content available on a website. Google has dedicated its search engine for its users. That means, if you’re publishing average content just to keep your blog active then that isn’t going to work.
If you really want to optimize your content so that it ranks, the first thing you should focus on is the topic. Try writing something on a viral or trending topic to get a good push up the ranking. Otherwise, even if you choose a general theme, your title and introduction are two crucial elements that will prove the authority of your blog.
Many content writers may know how to write, but due to a lack of SEO knowledge, they merely miss the keyword factor. Keywords are what you’ll probably be ranked on. If your content doesn’t have a good keyword density, then even Google’s crawlers won’t be able to give you a rank where you’d wish to be. Keywords are words or phrases that people type in Google searches. There are many online tools that you can use to initiate keyword research. For example, if you use the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll be able to know the number of monthly searches, competition, and even get a slight idea of how much it’ll cost you to run a paid ad on a specific keyword.
Therefore, next time you are about to publish content on your site, make sure it’s high on quality and keyword optimized for better outcomes.
3. Voice Search Is Here, and It’ll Grow!
It’s true that voice search will grow in popularity as years come. Apart from that, you can see many people using Siri and Alexa for their searches and commands. Google, also accepts voice command searches which means that they are working on improving this technology. According to research, by 2020 30% of all the searches will be made without a screen. This research shows that more people will eventually start using voice command, and you better start working on this.
One of the biggest SEO optimization tips for you to know is that all these updates and innovations are focused on to provide the best results on the go to users. Here are a few things you should add on your to-do list if you plan on optimizing your site for voice search.
· Use Conversational Search Queries
Instead of going for the one or two-word keywords, you should focus on conversational phrases. The best way to come up with such keywords is by asking yourself how you’d search for a specific topic in voice search.
· Utilize FAQ Pages
It can get a bit tricky to use conversational phrases as keywords on most of the pages of your site. Especially if you are running an e-commerce business. Therefore, you should have an educational FAQ center to target all these long-tail voice search keywords.
· Focus on Mobile-Friendliness
As I mentioned above, mobile optimization is a crucial element in getting a better rank. However, when we talk about voice search, it’s pretty apparent that the majority will be made through mobile devices. – Another great reason to work on mobile optimization thoroughly for your website.
4. Improve Your UI and UX
UX (user experience) is determined by the quality of your web pages, content, and even speed. If you want to enhance the UX of your site, you have to understand your users, their values, their needs, their limitations, and their abilities. Instead of going for a high-end website that is technical, simple is always better. In addition, here are a few key factors to focus on that were highlighted by an expert by creating the User Experience Honeycomb.
· Valuable
Everything available on your site has to be valuable enough that your users can use it somewhere else.
· Credible
You have to work on making your content credible. Trust is what’ll bring a reader back and encourage them to share on social platforms.
· Accessible
According to The World Bank, around 15% of the world’s population faces some sort of disability. Keeping this figure in your mind, you have to make your site accessible for such people as well.
· Findable
If users can’t find what they need on your site, then you’ve failed to create a good site for your visitors. Work on your sitemap and make sure that the navigation of your site is at its best.
· Desirable
In order to make your content and web pages, you have to increase the number of images, and banners on your site. Your design elements can target the emotions of your target audience.
· Usable
Your site should always be user-friendly. Technical sites are always ignored by users.
· Useful
All the content available on your site should be authentic. In addition, it should answer questions of your users as well as be highly informative.
Once you’re done with enhancing your website’s UX, you should work on the UI. The UI (user interface) design will have a substantial influence on the quality and usability of your site. The crucial elements that bring together this concept are visual design, interaction, and information architecture. Here are the best practices for maintaining an adequate UI of your site.
Maintain a simple interface
Tactically use texture and color
Be purposeful in page layout
Generate uniformity and use common UI elements
Don’t forget the defaults
Create a neat and tidy page layout
Wrapping Up
By knowing the current online marketing trends and SEO strategies that are expected to work in the coming year, you’ll definitely be ahead of your competition. Thought these strategies would take time and effort, you have to work hard on them as your website optimization strongly relies on them. Hopefully, the website optimization tips and trends mentioned above pretty much gave you an idea of what to look out for. So don’t waste any more time and start optimizing to get ranked and boost your organic traffic, which will enhance your lead generations and ROI.
About The Author:
Beatrice McGraw is a digital marketing expert who works for ExportHub – An Online B2B Marketplace specialized in connecting Chinese suppliers. She just loves to share her knowledge with the world in the form of blogs, videos and various other types of content. In her free time, she is an active gamer and a techwiz who adores researching innovative solutions that emerge in the digital world.
We all know that Google analytics is the most powerful tool. It has given so many reports for different reports. Yes, definitely this reports helps you to optimize your website. Nowadays SEO is the most important thing in digital marketing. This reports also help to define marketing strategy and SEO strategy for your business.
Website improvement (SEO) is a hotly debated issue that is continually developing. In the least complex shape, SEO is the procedure for getting found in web indexes, for example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. With any SEO methodology, checking and adjusting are key components. Google Analytics is an extraordinary device to screen SEO activities and in addition help with building up an SEO procedure.
Why Google Analytics?
It gives profitable experiences that can assist you in shaping the achievement methodology of your business. For this, you have to know the subtle elements of what individuals do when they visit your site, to what extent they remain and what all pages do they visit on your site.
Google analytics is a very effective tool which gives you a lot of reports with different features. Nowadays, all businesses are online and to analyze its outcome you have to use analytics tools. It’s free to use, gives accurate data, you can create customized reports as per your business.
There are several reports you have to look for SEO purpose. All this ways are given as below. Go through this reports to success your SEO efforts.
Most Viewed pages
This report will help you to see which page on your site is most visited. You can know about the pages which are less visited and you can make some changes accordingly. You can review that pages and change its content, images, designs etc as per your requirement.
You can also know that sessions, bounce rate, avg session duration for a particular page. For SEO purpose you can optimize the particular page. To see most viewed pages in analytics, Go to behavior section -> overview -> In that see the full report.
Search Terms and Keywords
In analytics, you know the search queries that user typed in search engines and reach your site. This keyword and search queries are the most important. You can add this search queries in the content of your site. Through this report, you can know what the user is thinking about your site. You can read your user’s mind with this report. You can know your website or organization name in many different forms.
In analytics, you can see this report in this way. Go to Acquisition -> Google ads -> Search Queries. You can deep analyze the report by applying the secondary filters.
Referral Paths
This report will show you from which path the user comes to your site. You can know the URLs which refer your site. From the referral URL, you can also get the idea to optimize your landing page. So, this is an area of improvement from an SEO perspective.
To see this report in analytics go to acquisition -> All traffic ->Referrals. You can apply secondary reports. For example, your referral traffic comes from your blog OR any other blog that you posted on another site, you can do changes on that blog to get more referral traffic.
If you want traffic from a blog then you have added more value to your content. You can also define content marketing strategy from this referral reports. So, this way you can use referral paths for your marketing campaigns.
Landing Page & Exit Page
Landing page shows you on which web page user entered your site. In some page of your site has a good amount of conversion rate and in some pages you get visitors but they are not converted in customers. So, you can improve this landing pages.
In the exit page report, you will see the report of the page where the user left your site. The list of URLs where user exit from your site, this list will help you to improve that pages where most of the user will leave your site.
In analytics go to Behaviour -> Site content -> Landing Page/Exit Page. You can compare the previous month/year report and do better analysis.
Site Speed
A site’s speed influences its pursuit positioning since website speed influences client encounter – a pivotal factor Google thinks about when positioning a site page. You can utilize the Site Speed include in Google Analytics to see which website pages need to enhance their pages speed. In analytics, you can see this report in Behaviour -> Site speed -> speed Suggestions.
The Speed Suggestions area offers recommendations on how you can enhance your site speed. To produce the proposals, tap on the cells under the PageSpeed Suggestions section and Google Analytics will take you to PageSpeed Insights – a Google-powered tool which prescribes ways you enhance your site speed.
Channel Grouping for Better Targeting
It’s critical to know where your customer is coming from. But with google analytics, you can know this. Analytics enables you to see a portion of the default channels at first, however, they can be easily customized in order to view detailed categories.
You can also see source and medium where your users are coming. From, this you can optimize your campaigns. Analytics gives a lot of data related to the user, their location, devices, browser, which technology they are using and many more. So, you can make SEO strategy by improving this.
You can know traffic source where your most of customer comes to your site. And these channels are most important to define the marketing strategy for your business. You can see this reports in Acquisition -> All traffic -> Channels.
In Conclusion:
There are lots of factors from where you can make a decision for an SEO perspective. This article is not about Guide of google analytics. Here I mentioned actionable steps to improve your website with the help of google analytics. All your SEO success depends on your analysis and the actions you take. If you have so e-commerce store then google analytics is a must. Nowadays competition in e-commerce business is increased day by day. So, need regular analysis of your site and update your site as per latest custom option features.
Analytics data brings you a lot of value for your SEO strategy. I hope this article will help you to get SEO success for your business. I like to reply to your comments and suggestion. Happy Reading..!
About The Author:
Hiral is working in digital marketing and content writing. She writes on topics like startups, entrepreneurship, e-commerce, digital marketing. She helps businesses to grow digitally with a new horizon. In free time she likes to explore new places and talk with different people.
You’ve devoted valuable time and creative energy into building a beautiful website. But while attractive, eye-catching designs and quality media are important; this alone will not make your site show up on popular search engines. For this, you need effective SEO. Fortunately, SEO on WordPress is relatively easy to learn and implement. With a little work and planning, you can optimize your site to show up on Google and other popular search engines. Check out the following eight tips to maximize the effectiveness of SEO on your WordPress site.
1. Provide Content Which Is Unique, Engaging, and Useful
In short, provide content people want to read. The content should be helpful, unique, informative, and engaging. When people do a search, they are most likely looking for information. Provide that information in an easy to understand and engaging way, and you will be far ahead of your competition.
Content should be consistently and regularly updated. One of the best ways to gain priority in Google’s SERPs is to consistently post quality content.
When posting content, make sure your first few paragraphs clearly explain what will be discussed in the article. This is important since Google gives added weight to the first few paragraphs of your post when indexing your page.
2. Set Your Permalinks
Permalinks are the URLs of your website pages. They are what users type into the address bar in order to go directly to your specific page. WordPress provides a default permalink, but it is best to change this name to something which describes your page or post. For example, you might choose to name the permalink the same name as the title of your post, provided the title isn’t excessively long or convoluted.
3. Create a Google XML Sitemap
If you want your web pages to be indexed by Google, you must provide a sitemap. Fortunately, creating one is easy. The WordPress plugin, XML Sitemaps will create a sitemap which will allow your website to be indexed by top search engines including Google.
4. Don’t Forget About Your Media
While creating a great looking site with eye-catching media is important, optimizing your media for SEO is equally important. When you upload an image to your site, don’t just use the default name assigned. You can change the image title, alt text, and image description, as well as add an image caption. Remember that search engines don’t see your images the way our eyes do and only evaluate your text, especially the alt text. So name your media with a descriptive title and accurately describe it with quality keywords. This will give you a competitive advantage over the many content creators who skip over media optimization in SEO.
5. Make Your Content Shareable
One of the best ways to get more traffic to your site is to make your content easily shareable. Put sharing buttons on your pages in order to make sharing on social media easy. A post shared by someone on social media is likely to be read by their friends, who in turn may also share your content with their friends.
6. Utilize Available SEO Plugins
There are many SEO related plugins available for WordPress websites, too many to mention in this short article. Regardless of the SEO task, there is likely a plugin available to assist you. Plugins can help you with everything from writing Meta titles and descriptions, to creating sitemaps and providing important analytical information about your readers. Plugins make your life easier so make sure to use them to their full advantage. My favorite is Yoast SEO.
7. Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the single most important analytical tool at your disposal. Best of all, it is totally free. Google Analytics is especially helpful in seeing how well your site is reaching your target audience. This is a tool you can’t afford to be without.
8. Provide Relevant Interlinks to Posts on Your Site
When possible, make sure your posts contain links to similar content on your site. Just make sure the links are relevant to the post’s primary topic. A link to a relevant article or page can help drive traffic to your site, as well as provide more quality information to your readers.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that even the best website will not be found without effective SEO. Follow the tips above and you will be well on your way to having your website show up and get found on the most popular search engines.
About The Author:
Matt Ramage has been building and marketing websites for over 20 years. He loves helping businesses improve their user experience and searchability on the Internet. His agency, Emarketed, is located in Los Angeles, California but his team is global.
Maximizing the visibility for an e-commerce business is the sole role of SEO for selling products or services online. In this maser guide, we will learn everything required to optimize your e-commerce website from keyword search to technical SEO.
The strategy that an e-commerce solution company follows is to make sure that the right content is positioned at the right time for the right person to look at. Keeping this in mind, in this post I am sharing the strategies which will help you expand your e-commerce website traffic and turn the visitors into customers. So, let’s dive in.
Keyword Research:
Set your SEO in motion by keyword research because this is the most basic step. By expanding your search engine ranking for as many suitable keywords as possible, you are raising the probability of your website being noticed and visited. Even the site architecture, URLs etc have to take the keywords into account and hence finding the right keywords for your website is a big deal.
Amazon is one of the biggest e-commerce sites, try entering a keyword in Amazon’s search that describes your own product. The Amazon suggested keywords will be the most targeted one. Likewise, you can try on other big sites also. Apart from this, you can also try using tools like Keyword Tool Dominator, to find the right keywords.
Start by finding the best-suited keywords for your product and then put them in the right categories and sub-categories. Amazon is a great place to find category page keywords. They have neatly designed their departments and subcategories:
Hence take a look at your competitors and how they have categorized their products and services and the keywords that they use to describe their categories. There’s even Google Keyword Planner to help with keyword research but it’s not very good for keyword generation.
Website Design:
The way in which your e-commerce website is designed and organized is an important factor for SEO. E-commerce websites tend to have more pages and hence it’s important to design it, simply so that the search engines and the user can find the right pages. Follow the following two promising guidelines for site architecture:
Keep the architecture simple and scalable.
Make sure that every web page is not more than 3 clicks away from the home page of your website.
Let us take two cases to understand how the authority matters for product and category pages. The following case an architecture which is neither simple nor scalable:
While the other case has an architecture which is simple and even scalable:
Looking at the two cases we can clearly make out that the second case has a better chance of keeping the buyer engaged because of the simple architecture. Buyers tend to drop interest if they are made to click 10-20 times to reach the buying page.
The On-page SEO:
Once your site design is ready, you can start with the category and product page optimizations. A person searching for “buy sweatshirt online for 9-year-old kids” is keener to buy rather than a person searching for “kid’s sweatshirts”. Use the primary keywords in your page’s title tag but don’t stop at that. You can add ‘modifiers’ also.
Add modifiers like “buy”, “cheap”, “deals” etc to your title tag to get listed in the more long tail searches. Like if your target keyword for category page is “sports tracksuit”, you can add words that people are likely to use “sports tracksuits in the sale” etc. Similarly, there are quite a few keywords that act like magnets and force the buyer to click, like:
X% off
Guarantee
Shipping Free
Easy Return
Sale
On similar lines, add right phrases in the description tag to tempt the buyer to purchase. You can add phrases like ‘Free Shipping’, ‘All items on X% sale’, ‘Best deal offers’ etc. Here is an example of an amended description tag for a product:
Here are the three paramount strategies most endorsed for on-page SEO:
Write a description in 1000+ words: It is found that descriptions with longer content tend to rank high on Google because Google wants to understand what your page is all about. Apart from this, the buyers can also understand better about the product, they are about to buy.
Scatter the keywords: Now that your description is detailed and complete, it is time to add your target keywords 4-5 times. This is simply to make sure that your keyword is mentioned on the page and Google understands what your page is about. But this is not at all related to keyword stuffing.
LSI Keywords: Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are those words which are closely related to your main target keywords. Like let say your main keywords is ‘frying pan’, then terms closely related to it can be ‘granite coated’, ‘nonstick’, ‘recipe’, ‘with a lid’, ‘nonstick set’ etc. Enter your target keywords on Google Keyword Planner to find what matching keywords it suggests for your ad. Now stuff these to your product or category description.
Technical SEO:
Practically all e-commerce websites tend to have 5000+ pages and this increases the betting odds of technical SEO issues. Technical SEO is at times a “tiebreaker” for the Google’s first page. Hence it is important that you audit your website often for technical SEO issues.
Use site auditing tools like Raven, SEMRuch, and DeepCrawl etc to perform an audit of your website. It can help you determine broken links, links of no use, content issues etc. If a page is not visited at all and is rather costing you money from your pocket, it’s better to delete or hide it.
Other options for fixing are to no-index such pages or club all such pages into a single ‘super’ page. You can also use e-commerce CMS tools to find which pages have generated revenue and which haven’t and then put those in the ‘maybe delete’ list. Such analysis and fixing can help in boosting the website performance and get on the Google’s first page.
Apt Content:
Content marketing is another way to boost your traffic and sales. Narrow down on what your target customers look for online like food, books etc; learn about the keywords that they use most on the web (in comments, etc) for activities other than shopping and create an appealing content blog around those keywords. Maintain a consistency in publishing posts on the blog.
Like the popular cookware e-commerce site, Williams-Sonoma.com has an amazing blog featuring recipes, cooking tips etc; their blog has a Page Authority of 66. If you don’t have the resources, you can hire SEO services in India or anywhere across the globe to do the right content marketing for your e-commerce business.
Take Away:
Look for opportunities to build more pages, optimize keywords and create appropriate categories and sub-categories. With a well-designed website and least technical SEO issues, you can definitely increase the traffic and sales of your e-commerce business.
Also, make sure that you are doing the right content marketing for your e-commerce business.
About The Author:
Hasel Smith is an enthusiast writer, working as a content writer for Vipra Business. She works closely to demand and provide Blogs and Articles on services giving by Vipra Business The company basically is an IT firm and e-commerce solution company Providing SEO Services India, Mobile App Development, E-commerce Development, Web Development, and Design. She has been lucky enough to work as a reporter and writer for a Web Online Portal, which has helped her to enhance writing skill. Vipra Business is known for proving cheap SEO service and Digital Marketing services to their clients.
Bots are programs that have been coded to imitate a person’s behavior on the computer or to automate a task. While there are plenty of bots that are “good” and can be helpful for websites to use, there are “bad” bots that can be used by hackers or other less-than-ethical internet users. Bots like Click Bots (can fraudulently click on ads, which reports skewed data to advertisers), Download Bots (which skews engagement data for download numbers), or Imposter Bots (which attempt to bypass the security measures online) are all “bad” bots that you should protect your website against. So, how do you go about it?
How Can Htaccess Help?
CMS users use plugins to protect their sites against bad bots, but a much more effective and efficient way to protect your website is with a .htaccess file. By using a .htaccess file, you can control the traffic to your site at the server level. This takes away the need to load a site asset like JavaScript or CSS, and you don’t have to load PHP or the database. Basically, the entire process is simplified and streamlined.
First, copy the below code and past it into your .htaccess file. What this does is acts as a control panel for your website to block any bad bots that might try and come your way.
This first highlighted section blocks some of the more infamous bad boots by using their user-agents.
However, the next section is what actually does the heavy-lifting of the blocking.
For this code to work you don’t need to do any editing; all you have to do is save and upload the file and you’re all set to go!
The Technique in Action
First, let’s trying accessing your website through a legitimate source, like Googlebot.
Go to this request maker tool, in the Base URL section type your website address, set the “Request Type” to GET, then click on Add Extra Headers button. The Header Field Name option with two boxes will appear, for the first box type Content-Type and for the second box type the Googlebot user-agent, which is Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Then, click on the Output Result Headers? Box, verify that you are not a Robot then click submit.
You will get a 200 Ok response from the headers, which the website is open to good bots, such as the GoogleBot that we tested it with.
Now let’s do the same process with one of the bad bots that we blocked using the htaccess code to ensure that it works.
Step 1: Go back to your FTP client and copy a bad bot (we will use Python for this example).
Step 2: Following the same process as before but now replace the user-agent for Googlebot with Python. As you can see by the code “403 Forbidden,” the request for the bad bot has been blocked.
The Bottom Line
By using this technique, you can add as many “bad bots” with user-agent strings into the code in order to effectively block them all. At the end of the day, while plugins may seem more convenient, using the htaccess file is the most effective way to protect your website.
Have any questions or comments? Have you used htaccess before or do you prefer using plugins to block bad bots? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
About The Author:
Emin is a website designer at Amberd Web Design, based in Los Angeles, CA. On his free time, he enjoys writing tutorials and how-to guides to help others.
Is your website’s traffic at a standstill? Kinda like a traffic jam, only without the traffic? You could be in trouble with the “SEO police”.
Welcome To The Club
We’ve all been there. The excitement of publishing a new post that you “know” will go viral. You can actually see the share counter skyrocketing (and hear the cash register ringing).
The disappointing silence is such an extremely low one can sink into a depression. Even great bloggers like Seth Godin and Danny Iny have been through it.
If you are like many of us when we started out you’re probably the only visitor to your website. Ouch! I know it hurts…it was painful for me too. I actually thought:
#1. “I’m not good enough at this blogging stuff.”
#2. “Maybe I have offended the Google gods.”
#3. “Something is terribly wrong with all the people in the internet world.”
#4. “Someone broke the internet”.
As a newbie, you probably plunged into cyberspace believing you would wake up with a tribe of followers and an overflowing bank account. I know I did.
But traffic in cyberspace is becoming hard to come by despite the number of users increases. So how do you increase your chances of visibility as a tadpole amongst sharks? Three words:
I used to tremble with fear and trepidation whenever I heard that term “Search Engine Optimisation” or SEO as this mysterious monster is popularly known. I know I am not alone, we all fear what we don’t understand.
Whenever I asked people about SEO I simply got vague answers in hushed tones. And so one day I set off on a quest. A quest to find and vanquish this monster that was keeping traffic from my website. Slaying it became an obsession.
I found the monster. But boy was I surprised! SEO wasn’t the dragon everyone made it be. In fact, it was just a friendly cyber being that was more than willing to drive traffic to my website. The only catch was and is: get to know it well and put it to good use. Actually, when I got to know it well, I discovered there was not one but two SEOs!
This is my mission today. I have returned from my quest and I feel it is my duty to introduce SEO to you. Ready?
The SEO Twins
Yes. You got me right. There are two sides to SEO.
#1. On Page SEO. This is optimizing your webpage and content. You can manipulate it in your favor with ease if you know what to do.
#2. Off Page SEO. This is a bit more advanced but so was blogging a couple of years back. In other words, you can learn it if you are willing to invest in the education.
Basically, Off Page SEO deals with factors like social networks, your competitor’s online authority and a few other secrets in Google’s secure vaults.
In this article, I will try to simplify On Page SEO so that you can be able to write and produce optimised content. Content that will be discovered, devoured and distributed. Brace yourself for a traffic jam.
On Page SEO Fundamentals
This part of SEO is under your control. Never mind what the “gurus” may say, you can influence the search engines to visit your site and increase its ranking.
According to Hubspot, On Page SEO accounts for 25% of all SEO. But that 25% if done right goes a long way.
I know you have heard this countless times but at the risk of being redundant, I will emphasize it too. The mistake many makes, when they delve into the mysterious world of SEO, is that they write for search engines. Once you fall into this trap, your website and content are doomed.
“Quality has become the #1 ranking factor in Google, especially since the Google Panda and Penguin updates.” Neil Patel
SEO is not just about ranking. It’s about ranking high with content that is valuable to people. Valuable content is shareable content and Google loves content that gets shared. This is why social media is getting so much attention in content marketing circles.
Join the bandwagon. Create content that people will have no choice but share.
If your post or website ranks high and is useless it will get few clicks and shares. That will bring its ranking crashing down. Not that dramatically but it will quickly lose its ranking.
It has been said from ages past by great men and I will say it again: content is king, after all, that’s what the internet is all about; content.
2. Research And Use Keywords Properly
When you come up with an idea or concept for your post, don’t jump into using the words you thought of. Research the keywords, or anchor terms, that define and explain your concept. For an in-depth read on keyword research, check out this article on the Kissmetrics blog.
I need to make something clear before I progress. In the “dark ages” of cyberspace (when the web became open to individuals), a single keyword went a long way in influencing SEO. Today, however, things have changed a great deal. In employing the keyword factor, you need to focus on, not only the keyword but long tail keywords, synonyms and topically related words and phrases.
The “Google Bots” are constantly evolving into more intelligent beings. For that reason, we need to employ more sophisticated tactics to court their favor.
Research which keywords will work for you and research their variants as well.
Once you have the required keyword, place it and its variants properly and naturally in your content. The major placement areas are:
*Headline
*Subheads
*First 100 words in your content (If naturally possible)
*Last 100 words of your content (if naturally possible)
* Sprinkle within the post (don’t overdo it. If you overdo it your content will be considered as spam)
*In the image tags
*In your URL
*In the meta description
As you write your content, don’t rigidly stick to your keyword. Instead, use its variants and synonyms. This is important because it signifies to the search spiders that your content is relevant in that area or field.
Pro Tip:
Keywords that work best are those your target audience uses when searching the net.
3. Structure Your Content Well
Search engines are not human, they depend on the structure to determine whether the content is relevant. This is where heading tags come in. Heading tags help search engines read the structure of your text. And, like any good essay, the structure is key.
Your content should have a clear headline, introduction, subhead, body, and conclusion. All these properly tagged.
Structuring content is not only good for the search bots but it also gives your readers a pleasurable reading experience.
Pro Tip:
Don’t just use default bold settings in your content. Employ proper H1, H2, H3 and whatever relevant tags.
“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.” Copyblogger.com
The power of a headline can’t be overemphasized.
I want to let you in on a pro tip. When it comes to captivating headlines, your headline should target people and search engines.
A headline that is captivating to the reader encourages readers to read your content. The longer readers stay on your page, the more SEO points you will score.
A headline that captivates search engines increases your ranking. If your headline solves a problem, Google will love it.
How To Craft Captivating Headlines
In my green behind the ear days, I used to naively think a headline that was clever was a good headline. I used to write a headline, gloat about it to myself and then hit the publish button. No one could resist my headlines, or so I thought. I’m sure we all know about the deafening silence after publishing my posts. You are probably experiencing the same frustrations now.
Captivating headlines take time to write.
According to Jon Morrow of smartblogger.com, you should spend more time crafting your headline than you do the content itself. That’s how important a headline is.
Again, my point is not to teach you how to craft headlines. Many authority figures have written superbly on that. But just to make sure, here are a few elements that need to be in your headline according to CoSchedule.com,
Use words that tug at the heart.
Include words that inspire.
Make sure your headline is the right length.
Right mix. Your headline should have the right mix of common and uncommon words.
Try out CoSchedules headline analyzer here. This is an awesome tool to help you in your headline sculpting endeavors.
The last element in your headline is the most critical when it comes to seducing the search engines: keyword.
Your headline should include the keyword you want to rank for.
This is the mistake I used to make in my newbie days. I never cared if a headline contained a keyword or not. As long as the headline sounded poetic I believed I had done a good job. An optimised headline must contain your keyword.
Pro Tip:
Don’t forget to make use of H1 tags on your headline. Search engines are known to have an affinity for them.
5. Use Images And Optimise Them
Images are important when you are crafting content of any kind. Not only are they friendly to the eyes, but, if used properly, can also befriend search engines.
To maximise images for SEO, be sure to tag them. There are two tags that should be added to your image:
Alternative Text, a.k.a ALT
Image Title Attribute
These 2 tags must also include your keyword. But make sure it’s reader-friendly too.
“I’m not a techie, how do I do that?” I am not a techie too. But that shouldn’t stop you. There are a number of SEO plugins that make this very easy. Two of the current best is All In One SEO and Yoast SEO. These are essential WordPress plugins that make it easy to edit image attributes and much more to optimise your content for SEO.
Pro Tip:
Crop images to the required size before uploading them. Use your keyword as the “save as” title.
Meta descriptions don’t necessarily influence SEO but they do influence the CTR (click through rate). The CTR though does influence SEO in that the higher the CTR, the more relevant your content will appear to be in the eyes of the search bots.
Again, even if you are not a techie, this is easy to do using the All In One SEO or Yoast SEO plugins for WordPress.
For an in-depth study on meta tags and their effect (or lack of it in other cases) read this article by Moz.
7. Links. Links
Links validate your website. And this is what search engines want; trustworthy websites and content. There are three basic types of links that help with SEO.
Internal Links
These are links to your website or blog. They are useful in keeping people longer on your site. This contributes in a small way in adding relevance to your site. I know I have used the word relevance a lot. This is because that is what search engines primarily search for; information that is relevant for users.
Outbound Links
These are links to other sites. When you link to another site to give readers more resources you give that site “SEO juice” but it also reflects back on your site as being a helpful site.
Pro Tip:
Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you. If you link to other sites, others will also link back to you.
Inbound Links
These are links from other websites to your own. These have a huge impact on SEO.
When other websites validate your own by linking back to yours, search engines rank you higher. Why? Inbound links show that you have something to offer and that is what Google, Bing and other search engines want; websites that offer valuable content. Relevant sites.
Get inbound links at any ethical cost possible. How?
Write great content people will want to link to
Make it easy to share your content (Easy to find and use share buttons are very handy)
Ask for links. Do this strategically and only for websites that you can add value to. Don’t be a parasite.
Warning:
Spammy websites may link back to you for their own devious reasons. De-Link them yesterday! These, when caught by the “Google police” can have effects as drastic as blacklisting your site.
Pages that load slowly get heavily penalized by search engines. This can be fixed though.
Get an efficient web host. Don’t go for cheap, go for competent.
Use themes that load quickly. When choosing a theme make sure it is not “heavy”. Read the theme description and ensure it’s a fast loader.
Reduce the number of plugins you use. Some plugins do the same job, others multiple jobs. Know what each plugin you install does and make sure it is not duplicating what another plugin is already doing.
Resize images. Most CMS systems, like WordPress, allow you to upload images and easily adjust them within the website itself. This is an awesome feature that comes at a price, it reduces your website’s speed. Instead, use an image editor to resize your image before uploading it.
Take advantage of tools like Pingdom’s website speed tester. This is a great tool that audit’s site’s speed and gives recommendations for improvement.
9. Embrace Google’s “Mobile First”
“The combined traffic from mobile and tablet devices tipped the balance at 51.2 percent, vs. 48.7 percent for desktop access, marking the first time this has happened since StatCounter began tracking stats for internet usage.” Tech Crunch.
This is a significant milestone in the history of the internet.
What this basically means is that as from October 2016, more people are browsing the internet on their smartphones and tablets than desktops and laptops. This statistic has two ramifications:
If your website is not mobile responsive, you will lose traffic.
The big one is that you lose SEO value.
Google’s updates have included mobile responsiveness to the criteria with which they rank websites. Responsive websites rank higher in Google’s SEO algorithms. Those that don’t embrace the mobile revolution get penalized.
3 Factors to consider as you embrace mobile.
Performance: Make sure your website is efficient. Slow and inefficient websites are penalized by the Google bots.
Content: not only should your content be sizzling hot and SEO optimised, but it should be easy to read on a small screen.
User experience: Navigation should be easy and fluid.
Cyberspace is evolving at a fast rate and you have to do all you can do to be on top of the game.
According to GeoMarketing, “Roughly 65 percent of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine going back to the days before they had a smart speaker, and 42 percent of that group say the voice-activated devices have quickly become “essential” to their lives.”
Due to ease of use and multitasking, voice search is increasingly becoming popular.
What should you do to optimise for voice search?
Adapt Your Keyword Strategy For Voice
“Your keyword strategy must now be more conversational in nature and mimic how real people talk and ask questions verbally.” Search Engine Land
Integrate questions into your keyword strategy.
Most searches by voice are question-based. People search for the “what”, “where”, “why”, “when” and “how” of life.
Your content strategy should answer these questions based on what your business does.
Maximise on local SEO.
Most voice searches are location specific. The searcher may be looking for directions to a place or business. To be found easily, include snippets that contain your business name, address, and keywords on your website.
In short:
“Voice search is characterized by its prevalence on mobile devices and its focus on local searches.” Search Engine Watch
The future of search lies in voice. Take advantage of this technological advancement and smooth talk your way to Google’s top listings.
11. Maximize On Social Media
“In fact, social media profiles are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names.” Kissmetrics.com
The impact of social signals on search engine rankings has become controversial since Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google algorithms don’t include social media signals in their ranking factor.
Even though this may be true, social media profiles rank high on Google pages and this enhances online authority, awareness, and engagement. And this is basically what SEO is about.
Another thing is that people trust websites that have an active social presence. In fact, more and more searches are being made through social media platforms.
The power of social media is in driving traffic to your website.
“It’s certain that if you want to be a key player in the SEO game, you need a social media presence. This means, setting up full pages for your business on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram and posting regularly.” Rank Sharks
Final Word
SEO algorithms are a secret that is as closely guarded as the secrets in the Vatican. Maybe even more. But as you apply the simple tips outlined here, you improve your chances of being discovered by a significant factor.
The world is waiting for you, my friend. Create sizzling hot content, optimise it and watch it go viral. That’s every content creator’s dream, isn’t it? And in this world of cyberspace, dreams become reality every day.
What are you waiting for? Revisit your old posts and get “SEOing”!
About The Author:
Kato is the Chief Content Strategist at bizcontenthub.com. A strong aversion to bland web copy has set him on a crusade to help you increase reader engagement by crafting hypnotic copy that will turn browsers into subscribers. Let’s get people talking about you.
We love to create awesome websites for small businesses! It is our passion and goal to help as much as possible people with a beautiful online presentation that represents who they are and what they stand for.
Matt Ramage has been building and marketing websites for over 20 years. He loves helping businesses improve their user experience and searchability on the Internet. His agency, 
We love to create awesome websites for small businesses! It is our passion and goal to help as much as possible people with a beautiful online presentation that represents who they are and what they stand for.