SEO success doesn’t involve any get-rich-quick schemes. It takes time and hard work, but if you’re willing to put in both with these five tips, you’ll reap benefits you never knew existed.
1. Research Your Keywords
Before you create a website, you need to know which keywords are going to help your search engine rank. When we talk about rank, we mean rank for a keyword that is relevant to your website. If you don’t know what those keywords are, how will you know how your site is doing?
Keyword research requires flexibility. The big-money keywords have appeal, but you’ll also find it more difficult to rank for those words. If you can, target low-competition keywords that have a consistent amount of traffic for the best luck in the long run.
2. On-Page SEO the Right Way
Many folks forget that SEO starts on their own websites. Don’t make this mistake. You can do plenty of things in your own backyard, starting with 301 redirects to force either the “WWW” or non-WWW version of your domain to load when someone visits your site. Use h1 tags for your most important keywords and headings. Highlight other keywords with h2 or h3 tags, which also help to break up your content for visitors. The last tag to use is your title tag. It tells your visitors where they are, and search engines display it on your every listing.
On-page SEO means adding title attributes to links, alt text to images and new posts to your blog. Create a sitemap that and submit it to search engines. Double-check your robots.txt file to make sure you’re not blocking search engine spiders, too. Finally, while you do want to include relevant keywords on your site, don’t use so many that your pages appear spammy.
3. In-Site Linking
In-site linking goes hand in hand with on-page SEO, with a focus on links. Link to your content from your own pages, as this is one of the most important SEO elements over which you have control. After all, you don’t have to ask anyone to link to you. Use the anchor text that both visitors and search engines will find useful. Develop catchy links and intriguing hooks that will keep your visitors wanting more. Practice with the appearance of your images and paragraph formatting, and do it all again if you’re not seeing the desired results.
4. Link Building
Despite the drop in emphasis on anchor text, link building remains important. It helps search engines determine which websites relate to keywords and which of those websites are an authority on the subject. Link building begins with creating quality content to which your visitors want to link and share. You should also make it easy for people to share your content with buttons to social networking sites like Facebook. Link building can be much more creative than that, however. Consider a weekly meme and an encourage visitors to use a badge to link to your site. Submit guest blogs to other websites to get your content and link out there!
5. Website Analytics
Once you’ve done all the proper on-site optimization, it’s time to sit back and relax–or is it? Give it a few hours once your campaign has gone live, and then head to your favorite analytics service. Many SEO pros use Google Analytics, which is free. These tools will show you your hits, visits, incoming pages, search queries and the pages where users are leaving your site. If you also use Google’s AdWords, you’ll be able to see how well you’re ranking for your purchased ads. If the boost from your new SEO campaign isn’t doing as well as you’d like, head back to your website and make some changes. SEO is all about flexibility, and analytics measure the success of that flexibility.
What other must-have SEO rules do you use to help your websites succeed?
Richad is a blogger, SEO Consultant, and into photography. Currently working for newyorkstatedivorce.com as consultant. In his free time he like to write about internet marketing in general, and help people understand it better.
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