The basics: building your SEO strategy
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Make sure you actually have a strategy, rather than a vague idea.
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The most important component in any SEO strategy is providing high-quality content that’s readable, informative, and shareable.
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When choosing your keywords for posts or overall blogs, think user intent: What would a user who wants to do business with you search for on Google?
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In link building, quality is more important than quantity.
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If you don’t get tons of traffic right away, don’t panic: Steady growth in organic search traffic is the best long-term strategy.
Structuring your site
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Familiarize yourself with the built-in SEO tools offered by your blogging platform.
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Invest in your own domain name, rather than using the free URL provided by major blogging platforms.
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Skip the long sidebar blogrolls, since site-wide outbound links actually reduce your search engine rankings.
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Link exchange programs damage your blog’s reputation with search engines, so don’t use them.
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Use a quality web hosting service, image compression, cache clearing, and other basic housekeeping techniques to keep your blog loading fast for visitors.
Optimizing your blog posts
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Pay attention to your post URL, post title (H1 tag), and meta title tags to ensure they contain searchable, relevant content.
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Write an interesting, unique meta description tag for each post with a call to action (if applicable); these bits of text will show up on search engine results.
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Selectively apply internal links to relevant or related posts on your blog.
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Unless the keywords are highly relevant and flow naturally with the text, avoid keyword-optimized anchor text inside your posts.
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Make sure to offer social media share buttons at the end of every post.
Composing your content
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Avoid duplicate content / reposting, because original content is given more weight by search engines.
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Don’t overuse keywords in your text; you’ll not only turn off readers with blatant keyword stuffing, but you’ll also be penalized by Google.
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Using bold or italicized subheads, lists, and bullet points helps to break up content for greater readability and placing keywords in subheads or emphasized text gives them slightly more search engine juice.
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Choose useful, relevant, and authoritative content (which is more important to Google) over keyword repetition.
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Use images optimized with descriptive alt text and captions to engage visitors and make search engines happy.
Driving offsite SEO
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Build more quality inbound links by guest blogging on high-ranking, authoritative blogs.
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Increase traffic and social shares by inviting other bloggers with active followings to guest post on your blog.
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In general, avoid directory listings and article banks as a link-building strategy unless you can be assured they are high quality.
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Press releases can help you build quality inbound links, but only if they’re newsworthy.
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Regularly review your link profile to remove bad links, update good links, and repair broken links.
These tips only cover a small portion of the vast and complex world of SEO. You can find more information about SEO than you’ll ever be able to use … but the more you know, the stronger your optimization strategies will be.
Originally posted on November 7, 2013 @ 2:57 am
