Search Engine Optimization is an important part of any online marketing campaign. You should produce high quality content to help your website rank higher in search engines. Your content needs to be optimized for keywords and phrases relevant to your industry.
Improving SEO performance is a top-priority goal for most companies. 73% of people use SEO skills and tools to make their content marketing more effective. These tips should help you get started.
Create Content Around Primary and Secondary Keywords
Content marketing is all about creating valuable, useful information that can appeal to your audience. If there are certain terms that are used by your target market, then it’s worthwhile adding those words into the title and body text of your blog posts or other types of content.
You also want to include these primary and secondary key phrases as close to the beginning of your post as possible. This means that they need to appear at least once within the first 50 words of your article.
Use Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords have low competition, which makes them easier to rank for. The longer the keyword phrase, the better. Try to keep your keyword phrases between three and five words long.
You use SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find low hanging long tail keywords. Use SEMrush free trial to get started and find easy to rank keywords.
Use Short, Descriptive URLs
Short, descriptive URL names help Google index and categorize your pages. Use shorter URL names when applicable. Moreover, short URLs are easy to remember and share on social media.
How you structure your URLs for your content?
An effective webpage URL should:
- URL should include one or more keyword you’re targeting.
- It should cater to human eye and make it easy for readers to quickly comprehend what the webpage is about.
- Shorter URLs are preferable. Keep these around 60 characters.
- Avoid using hyphens (-) and numbers (1, 2, 3).
Most search engines can’t process long URLs, which can push your site further down the results page, and this could have a negative impact on traffic.
Linkbuilding
Link building is another important part of any SEO strategy. Follow backlinks carry more weight than nofollow links. This means that if someone else links to your website, it shows Google that you are an expert in your field.
The more quality links pointing towards your site, the higher it will appear in search results. Bloggers, journalists, and other businesses often want to publish posts about experts in their fields. You can help them by offering to write a guest post. Your infographic or article should be useful to readers.
Reach out to publishers to cover your original research or data you have created for your on-site copy. Find various listings and directory in your industry, and then try to get your company listed there. This sometimes means joining industry associations, networking groups or business organizations, but this helps lend credibility to your website.
How do you figure out where to earn backlinks from though?
Use SEMrush Backlink gap tool to compare the links for your site with four competitors. You’ll be able to see which companies link to you more than others and vice versa. You’re also able to organize the list by authority, helping you identify high authority sites for your initial link building efforts!
Try to Rank for Featured Snippets
A featured snippet appears at the top of Google search results. This snippet contains a summary of the page’s content. The snippet also includes links to other related webpages. The snippet is based on the content of the webpage, but it does not include any advertising or promotional material.
This input shows how to optimize content for Google’s Featured Snippets. You can get featured snippets by using questions. Questions are effective because people always answer them. So if we ask a question about our product or service, there is a chance that someone will share their experience with us.
Format Your Content for Search Engines
When creating content you should focus both users and search engine. Headings and subheadings help search engines understand what your page is about. You shouldn’t have a single sentence paragraph because it makes your content hard to read.
Sentences shouldn’t be longer than 20 words, and you don’t want them to be too short either. Use bullet points or numbered lists when appropriate to make your content easier to read.
You can easily add keywords to both your page titles and meta descriptions. Make them powerful by using actionable verbs and focusing on what you do or sell.
Make Your Website Speed Faster
Did you know that your page load time affects how people perceive your website? Your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting your site) tends to be higher when your page loads slowly.
Google PageSpeed Insides helps you improve the performance of your webpages by checking them for errors and suggesting ways to improve their speed.
Do yourself a favor and remove any unnecessary plugins. You’ll probably see an increase in traffic. You can take benefits of Appsumo lifetime deals to find SEO tools that would help you in optimizing your website speed.
Use a Mix of Internal and External Links
Visitors should get useful information, rather than simply being sent back to the homepage. Internal links should help users navigate around the site, and encourage them to stay on the page longer. E-commerce sites should focus on keeping visitors on the page long enough to make a sale.
When it comes to external links you should vet them before adding them to ensure they are reputable. Some good external linking sources include popular websites with high traffic and regular production of authoritative, relevant content to you brand.
Publish Original Content
When adding new pages to your site, it’s important to post original content and avoid duplicate content. Your site should be different than other sites in your niche. You should also make sure that you’re posting high quality content. This helps you rank higher in search engines.
When publishing new pages, it’s important to avoid duplicate content. Good SEO practices include writing original content and avoiding plagiarism. Originality is key!
Conduct a Site Audit
Website audit will help you know how your website works. You can get answers about whether your site indexes properly, if there are broken links, and what your highest- and lowest performing pages are.
After this information, you can use it to make changes to your site. For example, maybe an audit found that you need to add more links to external sources. Or maybe it showed that you need more keywords. If you want to learn more about SEO, you can’t ignore regular audits. They’ll give you valuable insights into your work.
