Become An SEO Superstar For Your Blog – DIY Tips And Tricks

SEO plugins are a great tool for optimizing your WordPress blog, but how much of a difference does that green light really make?

While Yoast SEO is the industry standard for a reason, it should be just one tool in your SEO arsenal – it shouldn’t be your whole SEO process.

The appeal of Yoast SEO is how easy, straightforward, and convenient it makes optimization: just check off these items on a list, and your post will rank higher!

SEO isn’t quite that simple – but it doesn’t have to be difficult, either.

Here’s how you can go beyond the green lights to optimize each post, in three simple steps.

First: Keyword Research For SEO

The first step to optimizing any blog post is deciding which keyword to target.

Whether you try to find keywords that match your existing topic ideas, or use your keyword research to come up with new ideas is up to you.

In either case, you want to find keywords that are:

  • High volume: You should try to choose keywords that are regularly searched for by a large number of people, in order to get the most traffic possible from your efforts.
  • Low competition: Knowing the most popular keyword won’t help you if everyone’s already trying to rank for it. Avoid trying to compete with big companies with big SEO budgets.
  • Relevant: Your keyword should be something that your target audience will search for, and it should be related to your blog. It won’t help you to rank high for keywords that your target audience isn’t interested in, or that have nothing to do with your niche.

The trick is in balancing high volume and low competition, while staying relevant.

Targeting individual “long tail keywords” with each post is usually a good strategy if you don’t have a huge SEO budget. A long tail keyword is a longer search phrase that’s searched less often, but has very low competition. If you target multiple long tail keywords with your blog, you’ll end up ranking high for a variety of keywords, instead of trying to rank your entire blog high for one big high competition keyword.

You can also choose to target more than one keyword per post. Just make sure they’re closely related to each other, and represent the same (or very similar) intent on the part of the searcher. You might use your related keywords for your subheadings, for instance. However, Yoast won’t let you enter more than one, so you’ll have to choose one primary keyword to target with Yoast.

In order to get the data on keywords, you’ll have to use a keyword research tool.

Here are a few you can try:

Google Keyword Planner

search volume google keyword tool

Google’s Keyword Planner, an Adwords tool, is the industry standard, despite some glaring flaws. Rand Fishkin of Moz points out:

“It’s the best source we’ve got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what’s actually happening on Google’s search engine.”

That’s because the tool was built with advertisers in mind, not bloggers. Still, it’s a good tool to start your research with and get a ballpark idea of the search volume of each keyword.

AnswerThePublic.com

Running Low On Content Ideas Answer The Public

AnswerThePublic is a unique tool that gives you beautifully presented and incredibly helpful keyword suggestions. Just enter a word or phrase, and you’re presented with the most common questions searched for, plus tons of keywords ideas from A to Z.

Yoast Suggests

Yoast suggests keyword tool

Yoast provides a free tool on their website that uses the Google Suggest functionality to suggest related keywords for you. Just type in a word, and it will come up with a list of keywords for you to consider.

Second: On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization includes everything you do on your website and blog post that will help search engines to understand what you’re talking about and match your post with the right searchers. This is where the Yoast SEO plugin really shines.

Following the checklist provided with the Yoast plugin and getting that green light for your carefully chosen keyword is a great start to ranking high in search results.

On-page optimization includes things like using your keywords in:

  • The post permalink
  • The post title
  • Subheadings
  • The body of the post (especially within the first 100 words or so)
  • Image names and alt tags

It also includes:

  • Lowering your bounce rate by writing interesting, engaging posts that are formatted to be scannable
  • Speeding up your website so it loads as quickly as possible
  • Including outbound links to high-quality websites
  • Writing longer, more in-depth blog posts
  • Encouraging readers to share your post on social media (and making it easy to do so)
  • Adding internal links to other relevant blog posts

Third: Off-Page Optimization

Off-page optimization refers to anything you do off your website to encourage Google to rank you higher, such as getting mentions and links on high-quality websites across the web and on social media.

This is something that the Yoast plugin can’t help you with, but it’s a huge factor in how Google determines search rankings.

Some strategies for off-page optimization are:

  • Guest posting on other websites
  • Media mentions (especially if they link back to your website)
  • Social media activity

Don’t be afraid to reach out to other bloggers and ask them to share your best posts with their readers, or to offer to do a guest post swap. Check out How To Achieve Incredible Results With Blogger Outreach for tips on conducting an effective outreach without being spammy.

Green Light Is Not To Stop

You may have all green lights on your blog posts, but don’t be fooled into thinking that’s enough to rank high in search results.

While the Yoast SEO plugin is a great tool, it’s just one part of the whole SEO process. Start going beyond the green light today by researching keywords for your next post, and don’t forget to promote your posts after they’re published!

How To Improve SEO In 2017

Just like any other new year, it’s the right time to evaluate your SEO strategies according to the changes new year has come along with. This isn’t going to be any complicated, but still small little things in SEO world can show us disastrous results and who knows where your traffic is going when you are not doing things right. Ahhmmm maybe your competitor.

New year’s resolutions are not just about our personal goals, so it may be the ideal moment to focus on your business goals and seek the best ways to boost your SEO presence to improve authority, value, and ranking.

Well, let’s see some suggestions that you might find useful to know how to improve SEO in 2017.

Add More Value To Your Content

Everyone who is using the internet and has little knowledge about SEO knows the importance of content. As we say in our industry,

content-is-king

So, it is really important to add more value to your content keeping in mind that it should maintain relevancy with your niche customer group.

It never was about publishing unique content but also about knowing your audience well and the queries or solutions they are looking for currently. This will make sure that you rank on top in search engines as the present day query of your audience is what you are publishing about and practicing these steps daily.

Some more steps to add more value to your content,Dig deep into your existing content and find if anything is according to the present needs of your audience.

Dig deep into your existing content and find if anything is according to the present needs of your audience.

Investigate well about your audience’s niche queries before answering them as you don’t want to be hitting darts in dark.

The best policy to beat your opponent is perfect timing and suitable content, make sure you are mixing them both perfectly.

Do not hesitate to expand your niche area, provided that you’re still useful for your target audience.

Ease The Surfing Experience

web-surfing

For many of you who doesn’t know, the user experience is considered critical for SEO.

In fact, user experience starts even before the user visits your site and according to Forrester, 93% of online experiences start with a search.

Thus, it is more important to double check these tweaks to ensure a smooth browsing experience of your user,

Test your site’s link and fix the broken links to minimize the error pages or the duplicate content

Both user’s and search engine should be appealed by your content for effective readability and crawlability.

You should consider your user’s navigation as one of the top priorities. From menu structure to cross-linking of your pages and the page’s design should be built according to your user’s navigation as this might prove to be disastrous at the end if not taken care of. You can take help of User Flow in Analytics to know your audience’s navigation path.

You should maintain your site’s page speed, as it is one of the crucial properties that could affect your SEO badly. You can take help from Google’s Page Speed Insights and Mobile-Friendly Test.

AMP’s (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is the new trend that google is implementing from last year November to increase it’s mobile user experience. So this is definitely one thing you should consider for your SEO strategy in 2017.

Take More Time To Write Your Content

As we have already faced this in 2016 that the authenticity of your actual content is more important than it’s optimization.

There’s no need to spend more time on the optimization if your content is not appealing enough for your audience.

a-man-writing-on-keywboard

You should monitor the keywords, the user engagement to any particular topic and of course the user flow to find out what users are really expecting out of your page.
Think out of the box to expand your content’s reach and make sure you always think as a reader rather as a search engine.

Ask yourself, are the topics and the structure appealing to my target audience?

Remember, the combination of seamless user engagement with quality content can have a very positive impact on your SEO rankings.

Visual Content is The New Trend

Yup, you heard it right, visual content is definitely the new trend. It manages to enhance text in the best possible way (or even to replace it) and it certainly can affect SEO.
We strive so much for the other things that we majorly tend to forget how visual content should still be optimized for search engines, but luckily it only takes a few minutes to boost its SEO performance.

Titles should be relevant and according to the search trend

Don’t forget to add alt text, metadata, and keywords

Reduce file size as it will make your server heavy

Create a video transcript to facilitate your content’s discovery from search engines

Consider the idea of hosting the video to your own site, not just Youtube

Be different, add personality and make your visual content shareable

 

Keep An Eye On Your Online Footmarks

Your online presence goes way beyond your site. Every time we try a new social platform to expand our online presence, we tend to forget after some time to update it or even to use it as there are many platforms on the internet.

digital-footprint

It’s certainly a great idea to experiment with new platforms to promote your presence, but make sure you keep them up-to-date even if you stop using them.

For example, let’s say you create a Google+ page, but you’re not using it anymore (or you tend to forget to share your content there). Make sure all the details there on the page is up-to-date and a user can easily find your business by visiting your page.

Here’s a new task for your calendar in 2017, create a spreadsheet that monitors your online presence and check once a month that the information is up-to-date.
You never know how useful this may turn out to be!

Hope you have enjoyed the blog post, try and implement these strategies and let us know what impact has it done on your website as far as SEO is concerned.

Also, if you haven’t read about Few Tips For WordPress Site Owners to assist SEO or Top 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes, read about them.
How is WordPress going to change: WordPress in 2017 – Trends To Be Followed

Top 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes

Optimizing your website and weblog is an important part of your content promoting strategy. whereas SEO is an ever changing field, it stays on top of marketers’ agendas because it is a powerful way to bring footfalls to your company’s outlets and to direct them towards your sales funnel.

SEO strategies are perpetually evolving because of search engines’ developments and users’ dynamic views. it is not that simple to remain on top of the foremost booming optimization techniques, with several businesses falling into the lure of incorrectly doing SEO, rather than seeing large traffic and increasing conversion rates, the results are quite different.

There are some common SEO mistakes that are almost unavoidable. Testing optimization approaches is also tough since you can’t verify your strategies in real-time since search engines’ rules are getting arduous to predict.

While the optimization field is ever-evolving, some practices are proving effective, whereas others are harmful at the end of the day. Let’s review the top 10 common SEO mistakes you must avoid making sure your business online presence can bring the required results to match your efforts.

Let’s talk about our top 10 most common seo mistakes.

1. Selection of Keywords

The key to optimization are the keywords that you wish your website to rank for on search engines. However, are you selecting the correct ones?

Keyword-Selection-Weblizar

One of the most common mistakes in choosing keywords is ignoring the priority of search engines and users for long-tail keywords. Whereas you would possibly define your product and services in a very certain manner, it’s more necessary to know what words your potential customers would use to reach to them. Generally, the terms you think are correct may possibly mean something completely different for others, or may be too generic. In either case, you’ll be optimizing for all the incorrect keywords.

It’s best to try and do your background analysis carefully before you begin the optimization. Using tools just like the Google AdWords KeywordPlanner, Google Trends, SEMrush , AHREFS and Moz Keyword explorer will facilitate vastly in putting your finger on the tip of trending and adequate keywords.

2. How to Stuff your Keywords

You might assume using your target keywords in each and every sentence of your content would boost your rankings online. This strategy isn’t much but a myth. In fact, exaggerating your chosen keywords is registered as spammy by search engines, which implies it badly hurts your SEO performance.

That’s why keyword ‘stuffing,’ or overusing your supposed keywords, isn’t crucial to your SEO success. Such an approach would create your content unnatural and useless for its meant audience. In fact, Google is using a special linguistics search known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). This program will identify your content’s subject without the necessity for stuffing your content with repetitions of your target keywords.

3. Posting Content Unrelated to your Keywords

Another common snare in SEO optimization is generating content that’s not really concerning your keywords. The matter of fact is that you simply need to rank for a particular keyword, but you fail to focus the text on your target topic. Search engines like Google make it sure to serve their users with the most relevant content for their search terms. Thus, if your content doesn’t answer user needs, it won’t rank well.

This error is usually a result of making an attempt to suit a couple of entirely different topics among a single piece of content, making low-quality work only for the sake of including keywords or optimizing for many keywords in one article. Your primary goal ought to be to provide content that really corresponds to the queries and needs of your audience, as well as using the correct search terms. Then search engines are going to be able to trace your content as resemble the keyword you’re optimizing for.

4. Content is King

This next ordinary mistake is expounded to the standard of your content. While duplicating lines was a normal practice back in the days, now search engines punish this approach. Repetition and copying content is seen as a spammy method and is extremely downcast.

content-is-king-weblizar-blog

Duplicate and slim content merely don’t work. Rather than scratching off the copy from different places or using the software system that alters the content into a brand new form, it’s worth investing in making original and purposeful texts. This is often the only way to ensure your website doesn’t get downgraded and pushed within the back of search results.

5. Don’t Forget Title Tags and Meta Tags

Optimizing your content doesn’t end once you contain a target keyword in your post. Title tags and meta descriptions are essential components of SEO that should not be overlooked. Skipping them directly means to decrease the potential of your content. These optimizing factors are taken into account by search engines once crawling your online property, thus if properly done, they’ll improve the appearance of your content.

Another technical aspect that content marketers generally skip is encoding image tags to all the images. The alt tags of the visuals you cover in your content are vital, as they’re another sign of how you’re targeting articles. Search bots cannot see the images – however, they’ll scan the alt tags and add this info in the manner they index your pages.

6. Backlinks

To get the most out from SEO, content marketers these days should know this that the quality of external links included in content is much more necessary than their quantity. That’s why it’s better to make sure you are linking to relevant, well-ranking and good PR websites with solid online reputation – not simply any website. It’s also helpful to link back to sites that have connected to you, as this brings back traffic later on.

Another dangerous practice when it includes links is using useless anchor text. This wastes valuable SEO opportunities because the anchor texts signify to the reader and to look bots what the link is regarding about and the way it will be beneficial to users. Thus, avoid using ‘click here’ as an anchor text and ensure you pick for a range of anchor texts, and not using a similar text over and over again that will be seen as spammy.

7. Keep your Internal Links on the Grid

There is also another common mistake once including internal links that you really should look out for. Typically, it’s essential to assume your top-performing pages and think about injecting links to them in your content. This is often a way to provide them visibility and make further traction. But ensure you don’t comprise internal links only for the sake of arranging them in a piece of writing if they don’t match the topic and focus of the composition.

As with keyword stuffing, it’s crucial to observe out and not exaggerate internal linking. If the content and links appear unnatural, the work will not be appreciated by your target customers. it might not be favorably treated by search engines either because it is seen as a dishonest practice.

8. Mobile-Friendly Experience should be Maintained

SEO isn’t solely about content and keywords. It’s also regarding the condition of your website, significantly its performance on mobile devices, that are users first priority these days. Google and all other search engines will recognize once your website isn’t mobile-friendly.

If you haven’t thought of a sleek mobile experience for your audience, your grade on search engines will be jeopardized. A similar concept goes for load speed, as it is also an important factor as far as search engines are concerned. You shouldn’t be shocked if a slow website results in lower SERP. You can use online tools like Pingdom and GT Metrix to research where the speed issues come from and the way to repair them.

9. Increase Social Media Power with the help of Influencers

Optimization contains a social dimension also. After you are distributing your content on social media, one among your main purpose is to induce the awareness of users who have a major online influence. This indicates that their content gets noticed by each your readers and by search engines. That’s why it’s vital to make a connection with such ‘power users’ and to use their reliability to market your content.

Another side of this can be submitting your blog posts or website promo to social sites like Digg, Reddit, or Quora while not having a power user. It’s abundantly easier to create noise about your content once the user sharing it has plausibility on that network. Building link and doing structured reach via influencers is an essential part of your optimization plan.

10. Analytics is the key to ” Repeating Success “

Last but not least, the sole way to understand if your SEO optimization and content efforts work are to trace their growth. Several marketers would ignore the numbers, however, this is often a heavy set of mistake. setting up and frequently reviewing your analytics is crucial for your optimization results.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are simply two of the most amazing tools you can use to calculate and acquire a summary of your website’s performance. With their help, you’ll be able to see how your optimization is functioning for numerous types of content and using various ways you’re attempting to reach out to your targetted audience.

Search engine optimization is a crucial part of any content promoting strategy these days. While you can notice lots of recommendation online, creating a variety of typical SEO mistakes is kind of common. Instead, it’s better to urge well acquainted with the challenges that others have experienced and avoided them in your promoting efforts. These ten errors have evidenced quite widespread so that they are currently easier to recognize before you make them.

Hope you had learned a lot of the top 10 most common SEO mistakes,

Meanwhile, you can also check out to some of the useful WordPress Plugin that ensures your image is SEO friendly or a Responsive Image Slider to show your photographs.

More Plugins.

Read about how you can boost your video rankings on search engines or Most Googled terms of 2016.