Have you been working away at your content marketing, only for your SEO to not really churn out the results you wanted? Make your efforts worthwhile, and follow these good practices to make sure that your SEO succeeds using these strategic tactics.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
First, you need to take a strategic approach in regards to keywords. If you don’t research your keywords well, your SEO isn’t set up for success. Your keywords help to lay the foundation for your SEO’s campaign. Therefore, your keyword phrases should be as specific as they can be, without any sort of “stereotypical” marketing sound; they should be conversational, just like you would look up things in a search engine. It is important to remember that you should not get bogged down in trying to find the ‘perfect’ keyword optimization in all of your content that you write. This will only slow you down, and it is very difficult to compete for a top spot on a search engine ranking for your business niche against long-standing competitors. Rather, you should focus on a long-tail keyword approach. Publish as much well written, compelling content as possible, which will naturally include your keywords. In doing this, you are able to capture long-tail traffic. This type of search traffic typically comes from keywords that you most likely would not have found during research, and they most often are more properly targeted, which leads to improved conversion rates.
Be original
Now that you have your keywords working for you, remember to always be original. In regards to your SEO, you should definitely always avoid having the same content (or duplicate text) on two separate URLs. By republishing articles from other websites, you are creating duplicate content that can potentially destroy the search rankings for your site. Additionally, you risk a potential copyright infringement by republishing articles that are from other websites other than your own.
Onsite elements
Next, all your on-site elements across your entire website should be optimized. What this means is that your meta descriptions and your title tags should be relevant and optimized in order to give you the most successful SEO. Both of these elements should be present on all pages of your website, and, of course, should be relevant to your content. If your tags or descriptions are too short, or too long, they can hinder your SEO’s efforts; conducting an audit of your website can help to identify if there are any large-scale problems with either of these elements. Title tags arguably may be more important for SEO purposes than meta descriptions; however, these descriptions are the ideal place to create intriguing content copy that can generate clicks from readers via the results of a search page.
Avoid traps
Although it may be tempting, you should never buy links from another website. Not only is buying and selling links against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but search engines are very up to speed: they can detect links that are unnatural or suspicious. As a result, if you do buy or sell website links, the rankings of your website on a given search engine could fall drastically. Avoid this trap, save your money, and spend your time and effort on creating content that will organically attract or earn inbound links naturally. In regards to being natural, you first should focus on creating content that is valuable- for you and for your readers. Don’t try to jam as many keywords into your content as possible with the attempt to improve your SEO- this only makes your content sound way over-marketed and will drive readers away. If you find yourself trying to shove a keyword into a sentence, rethink what you are trying to do. If your sentences sound like they are trying too hard to be found by a search engine, it’s because they (and you) are. Search engines are improving every day and are getting better and better at detecting keyword stuffing, and the only thing that will result is a drop in your search engine rankings and annoyed people who try to read your content, causing you to lose credibility.
Remember to listen
As important to remember to write naturally to attract your readers, and essentially, customers, it is equally as important to listen to what they have to say. By engaging with your users via user reviews, comments, or any other sort of feedback offered by your readers and users, you can build your website’s viability in search engine generated results. The more positive feedback, obviously, and the more authentic, the higher your website will appear in search engine results. Encourage user feedback and engagement, thank them for their responses, and if there is a negative review or comment, ask directly how you can effectively address that problem.
From increasing roles of digital search assistants to ever increasing local mobile search, 2017 is going to be a big year for fostering SEO changes. SEO is there to improve the user experience and usability of your website, and easy steps can be taken to boost your SEO for the next year to come!
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