The world of Search Engine Optimization is changing rapidly. Google and Facebook are are not only updating their PageRank algorithm and guidelines, but also releasing new features and paying attention to websites adopting best-practices.
However, the old-but-gold guidelines of SEO are still hold true and are the fundamentals of a successful ranking strategy.
But what is the optimal SEO technique? Which linkbuilding methods are outdated? How does keyword distribution influence your website?
What is a proven SEO strategy that works?
In this article, we will look at the 10 steps that will lead to success in the SEO space and drive organic traffic to your website.
1. Make Your Website Blazing Fast
Not only is it extremely annoying to your website visitors to have to wait 5 minutes for it load in their browser, it is also extremely bad for your Google ranking.
Nowadays nobody has time. Everyhone is busy, everyone is used to information readily available at their fingertips: Nobody will wait for your slow website to load – they will move on and and shop at your competition.
To make your website lightening fast you can follow the following steps:
1. Remove unneccessary images, videos and animations and content that is slowing you down.
2. Compress and optimize existing multimedia content
3. Minify your javascript, CSS and HTML files
4. Leverage browser caching techniques
5. Use a Cloud Delivery Network to serve content
Leveraging these technologies to speed up your website will not only create a friendly user experience, but also pay off in your rankings in the long run.
You can read more in-depth about how to speed up your website here.
2. Link Out To Useful Content
Don’t be afraid of loosing visitors and readers by linking out to other websites.
In fact, it is encouraged to do so and that healthy and natural links are a fundamental aspect of your website.
Not only do outbound links make your website a deeper and valuable resource, but it also gets rewarded by search engines, as the founder of moz describes in his blog.
Think of it this way: You want your readers to learn something and you want to provide valuable content and give your visitor further resources to study, in case they want to learn more in-depth about the topic at hand.
Lastly, creating outbound links helps the engines determine the topic and question discussed on your website and incentivizes other authors and blogs to link back to you in return.
3. Minimal Page Length
The good days of keyword stuffing and tag stuffing are over.
In todays competative SEO environment content matters. Don’t just make a separate services and product page, place a picture and some keywords. Write good shareble content.
Ideally you should write a 1000+ words copy that is semantically and grammatically correct and strategically places your keywords within the content. Don’t just write for the sake of keywords: Write for actual content readers.
4. Encourage Authoritive Links
Inbound links or backlinks still play a large role in SEO strategy.
Good content is worth sharing. Make your articles unique and make them good.
Don’t be afraid to ask for links or encourage people to link to your articles.
Reach out and ask. You find that if you provide good value, people are more than happy to link to your blog and their domain authority will help with your Google ranking.
5. Track Your Progress
How can you imporve your ranking if you are not tracking it? How do you know your website demographic? Your retention rate?
The best way top stay on top of it is to start tracking your progress from day one.
These are the must have plugins you need to run on your website:
1. Google Analytics
2. Google Search Console
3. Bing Webmaster Tools
Get this right from your first day and you will have scalable system so you can build and improve upon.
6. Make Your Meta Descriptions Perfect
Although this is not as significant in terms of overall SEO as it used to be, it is still a fundamental part of SEO. Your meta descriptions should be unique and perfect. Describe what the page is about. Make it clear and concise. Make Google understand what your page is about. Make it enticing for users to click on it: It is the preview of your website and your chance to get visitors to come and check it out.
Most importantly: Don’t leave your meta descriptions empty and don’t create dublicate descriptions – it will hurt your ranking.
7. Optimize You URLs
Your URLs are another way to entice visitors to click on your website. But not only that, it is another important signal you send to Google regarding your keywords and content.
Dont make your URLs execcively long, don’t make them unreadable and don’t make them nonsensical.
This is a bad link:
https://www.investor.com/article/283109232
Make it so that any potential visitor can immediately understand what your page is about without having to actually open your link.
This is a good link:
https://www.investor.com/article/benefits-of-mutual-funds
8. Enable Social Sharing
Social media is the hot thing in 2019. Do you have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn setup for your page? Time to get it setup then. What about share buttons? If organic shares of your content increase traffic to your site…why not make it easy for visitors to share? Help your website spread around the internet!
9. Optimize The SEO Of Your Images
Images play an important part in your on-page content. Google’s web crawlers can’t proccess images, music or videos…a least not yet. So tell them about the contents!
Give your images a meaningful name:
This is a bad name:
https://www.bluelightweb.co.nz/wp-content/2198012.png
This is a good name:
https://www.bluelightweb.co.nz/wp-content/google-analytics-dashboard.png
Furthermore, don’t forget to set an alt tag for your image so that users who cannot load the image at least get to see what the image was supposed to be about. A great opportunity for keyword placement too ?
10. Create Good Unique Content
If you have been in the digital marketing space for a while you will be familiar with the last most important aspect of SEO: Content is king.
Nothing will ever beat good, unique, relevant and valuable content. Find out what your target audience is interested in and go blog about it. Become an expert. Find the questions and then provide the best and most extensive answer to that question to your readers. You will gain credibility, authority and ranking. Don’t ever stop writing, keep creating consistent great value articles and you will soon see the results being rewarded.
Nick Berns is at the helm of the Bluelight agency. With 6 years of experience in digital marketing, he is passionate about growing businesses through organic and paid marketing solutions.
