SEO Basics, On-Page SEO, Link Building, Social Media

Content, Traffic 60 Must Know Tips

1. Two important places on a page to put your keyword are the title and the URL. Those are the places where it will almost certainly display in the search results.
2. Always plan your site structure before starting to build it. Make sure that the content is structured logically, allowing you to use targeted keywords for all the relevant categories.
3. Create dedicated pages for each targeted keyword, but don’t go overboard with it. If you target the “small business seo” keyword, for example, you should create a http://www.yoursite.com/small-business-seo
   page on your site.
    
4. Consider SEO when branding your company and any products or services you introduce: Is the domain available? How competitive are the terms? Is it easy to remember and type?
5. Avoid hyphens in your domain name (examplesite.com is better than example-site.com).
6. Human-readable, user-friendly URLs trump URLs with numerical query parameters (example.com/keyword-keyword-keyword vs. example.com/?id=12345).
7. In contrast to the domain name, keywords in a URL should be separated with hyphens (/keyword-keyword, not /keywordkeyword).
8. The closer your keywords appear to the domain name in the URL, the better.
9. Don’t assume you know what words your customers use to describe your offerings – do your research. Use keyword tools.
10. Compare and combine results from multiple keyword tools.
11. Do a competitive analysis of the SERPs for your top keywords – who is ranking and how can you compete?
12. Lower your website’s bounce rate. Whenever somebody clicks your website page in Google’s search results, skims through it for a few seconds, and then returns back to Google, this tells the search engine giant that something’s bad. In SEO terms, the “dwell time” is too short.
13. If you plan to start a new site, consider using WordPress; it is fast, easy to use and has lots of free, SEO-related plug-ins.
14. Don’t neglect the “long tail” – longer keywords that are lower volume, but less competitive and more specific.
15. Use your keyword close to the beginning of the body text of a page.
16. Use Google Trends to find keywords/topics that are spiking in volume.
17. The suggestions that pop up when you start typing in Google are a great source of keyword ideas too.
18. Have clear goals in mind before you start doing SEO. Have some baseline metrics in place to measure progress against.
19. Having a dedicated “Contact Us” page which lists your contact address, phone numbers, etc. is mandatory. Google wants to make sure that you run a real business, and not an affiliate site built for the sole purpose of netting a quick buck.
20. Don’t make changes you won’t be able to undo, in case anything has a negative effect on rankings or traffic.
21. Get friendly with an analytics application. Google Analytics is free and covers the basics.
22. Put someone in charge of monthly or even weekly reporting to track performance (traffic, links, rankings for top keywords, etc.).
23. Most search engines can read the simple text that appears on a website’s bitmap-based buttons now. Use that to your advantage if you can’t switch to plain text links (your boss doesn’t like that?) by placing the targeted keywords on those bitmaps.
24. Give it time. SEO is an ongoing process, not a quick fix.
25. Use the keyword reports in your analytics to expand your keyword research and get new content ideas.
26. Link to other pages of your site whenever it is possible to do that naturally; this will keep the visitors on your website for a longer period of time, boosting your search engine rankings.
27. You can also leverage those keywords to refine and better optimize older pages.
28. If you post videos on YouTube, optimize each one the same way you’d optimize content on your own site – use keywords in the title, description, and so on.
29. Include links from your YouTube pages back to your site.
30. Google evaluates the quality of a site by taking relevance, content quality, compatibility and loading speed into account. If people like your content, engage with it and visit your site regularly, Google will send you more visitors.
31. SEO Spyglass is a free/inexpensive tool which can detect most backlinks that were built to a particular website.
32. Understand what duplicate content is and how it impacts your site
33. Transcribe videos so that search engines can more easily determine what they’re about – and so visitors who’d rather read that watch the video can still benefit.
34. Keep the title of each page under 70 characters so it displays fully in Google results.
35. Create a formula for title tags so it’s easier to write SEO-friendly titles on the fly.
36. Create two keyword-friendly titles for the same page. Use one for the title tag and one for the H1 tag. Both fields have high SEO value.
37. Subheads are another place to put keywords, and also organize your content, making it easier to read. Use H2-H5 tags for subheadings. (The higher the number, the less important the heading.)
38. The title attribute in a hyperlink can be used to give visitors/search engines more information about a link. Again, think keywords.
39. All paid and affiliate links should have their “nofollow” attribute set. According to Google, these links don’t transfer PageRank or anchor text, so (in theory) nofollow links won’t provide any SEO benefits to the sites that you are linking to.
40. Write a unique, descriptive, compelling meta description for each page you create. These can increase click-through from search engines to your site.
41. Meta keywords are ignored by Google, but they can still bring in traffic from some of the less popular search engines. Use a few relevant keywords for this meta tag – it may help.
42. Don’t buy a high PR domain for your new website without checking it thoroughly, though. People have created fake PR9 domains by redirecting them to real PR9 sites, and then they have sold them for large amounts of money.
    
    Real PageRank comes from high PR links pointing to it; if the high PR domain that you intend to purchase doesn’t have them, you are being scammed.
43. Discover your competitors’ keywords using tools like SEMrush, Spyfu and Ahrefs. Then, test each keyword using all the methods listed below; you will discover that some of them are either useless or too competitive. Incorporate the winners into your content creation and outreach strategy.
44. Don’t check your keyword rankings more than once a week; daily rankings changes are irrelevant for long term success, not to mention that observing the ranking fluctuations on a daily basis can cause a great deal of stress.
45. Pop-ups that fill the entire screen are ugly! There, I have said it. And if this happens on mobile devices as well, Google will start hating your site. So don’t ever use big pop-up screens!
46. Use Quora to understand the main problems of your potential customers. Then, write a report that solves/answers them and give it away on your website, or upload it to the top document sharing sites.
47. Set up Google Alerts to get ideas for your blog posts. 
48. Pages with longer content (1,000+ words) that provide all the needed info about a particular topic rank better than ever before.
49. Don’t be afraid to link out to authoritative websites in your industry. Yes, you are losing some link juice, but this is a positive sign which tells Google that you aren’t keeping it all for yourself.
50. Use Flickr’s advanced search to find 100% royalty free images for your blog posts.
51. Check and fix the 404 errors; they contain links to website pages that no longer exist, and Google doesn’t like that. 
52. A good link doesn’t just have a big authority, but sends targeted website visitors as well. It is much better to get a lower PR link from a popular website, rather than getting a high PR link from a site that nobody cares for. High PR, low quality sites tend to lose their PR quickly anyway. Alexa isn’t the most reliable website popularity tool in the world, but it’s still a decent way of separating the dead sites from the rest. Stay away from any site that has an Alexa rank below 5,000,000.
53. Don’t just rely on SEO for traffic. Forum posting, ethical article marketing, guest posting, offline marketing (flyers, etc), Q & A sites, document sharing sites and giveaways are just a few examples of free and inexpensive website traffic sources.
54. Start a blog and publish new content regularly. Creating an editorial calendar helps.
55. Use categories or tags to communicate the topic of each post and help people find related content on your blog.
56. When you publish a new blog post or other page, post the link on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites.
57. To build up your Twitter followers, follow similar users and retweet their links and updates.
58. Tools like Canva make design very easy, though. Use it to create great images for your blog, social media covers, posters, infographics and more.  
59. Offer to write guest posts for related blogs in your space, especially those with strong followings and high-value domains.
60. Offer to write a testimonial for a product you love, and ask for a link in return. 

 

Happy Blogging!