The secret to success in SEO lies in knowing which areas you must focus on to ensure that everything functions smoothly. Once everything works well, it is imperative for you to move in the right direction because whatever you are doing originates from some strategies that you have developed after careful consideration. Have you established a strong manual outreach plan and taken the time to optimise your content? To ensure smooth functioning of all the elements of SEO, before you implement any process it is of utmost importance to check that everything that you want to perform is ready to function the way you want.
According to the SEO experts at Cultivate Express, having a checklist to verify every point of action is part of the best practice that you must strictly follow. It is like having a thorough check of your vehicle before going on a long drive. Indeed, it does not guarantee protection against mishaps, but it increases the chances of performing better in search engine rankings. The focus of attention must be on everything concerning keywords, content, and links, which are the pillars of SEO. Which area of SEO you must concentrate on before taking the plunge will be clear as you keep reading this article.
Choose the keyword
SEO moves on keywords, which are the search terms that commonly surface during searches. You must know which are the key words commonly used by searchers in your business niche so that you can develop your SEO strategy around it. There are two steps in the process – first you must identify the keywords and then ascertain its power to drive traffic. Since the purpose of using keywords is to drive maximum traffic to websites, the ability to attract traffic is also an indication of how much search engines like it. Keep in mind that the purpose of SEO is to be lovable to search engines as well as the targeted audience. The better you can balance between the two, better is the SEO prospect. Using a Google Keyword Planner is an easy way to get a toehold in keyword research that follows.
Gauge the competition
After ascertaining what search terms you must target, you must know as much possible about the opponents. Unless you know about the competitive scene, you will never be able to work out the appropriate strategy that would help to encounter it. You must try to figure out how your competitors are doing and try to understand what keeps them ticking. Use the chosen keyword to obtain a search list and concentrate on the first ten results, excluding the paid advertisements, as this constitutes the core of competition that you would be facing. Analyze each website very carefully to figure out the reasons why it is doing well, and you will gain valuable insights that would help to build your campaign in a better way.
Create high-quality content
To make your website stand out from the crowd, you must create original content of high quality that is most relevant for the target audience. It is perhaps the most difficult part of SEO campaign but is also the most important. Compelling content not only draws great attraction, but it also enjoys a high rate of sharing. Quality content creates wider outreach and keeps visitors engaged for an extended period. Website authority gets a boost through extensive sharing of content, and this aspect would in turn favorably influence search rankings. The success of SEO is largely dependent on your ability to produce cracking content that the audience would lap up.
Keyword in header
Presenting content on the web page needs special skills because it helps Google to understand easily what the content or page is about. Organizing content is a critical aspect of SEO that can make a lot of difference in performance. For better consumption of content, its layout should comprise of the main heading with several sub headings for the sub parts of the content that are broken into small sections as it facilitates quick understanding. Placing exact keyword phrases in sub-headings is almost mandatory.
Page title must have keyword
If sub headings are important places for keywords, you can well imagine how important it is to put keywords in the page title. However, the only difference is that you may or may not use exact match keyword phrases in the page title. The most critical element is that the title must be enticing and not the run of the mill type. If the title is not attractive, it will escape the attention of viewers although keywords would be good for search engines.
Keyword in the post as well as URL
Since the URL is the most prominent place that Google looks at, putting the keyword in URL enables Google to figure out quickly about the blog post. It increases the chances of Google picking up the content during searches for the keyword. By placing the keyword in the post, you make it easier for Google to link it to the searches as now there is a keyword at the most relevant places where Google might look for it.
Point to the content internally
It may sound like beating your own drum, but you cannot help it. Provide proper link throughout the website so that no matter on which page the visitor is, there are high chances that they would automatically reach the content that you want them to see. If needed, you may have to edit some old posts to include links to new content.
Acquire backlinks by following a link building strategy
External links or backlinks remain as relevant as ever before. When you publish quality content that drives traffic and enjoys sharing, Google picks up the signal, interprets it as a sign of authority of your website and uses it favorably during ranking. Follow a link building strategy to establish a relationship with other sites that would willingly share links with you.
The above listing is only a part of good SEO, but by following it, you will get a head start that puts you quite a few steps ahead in the competition.
Conclusion
SEO is an integral part of promoting your website on the web and just not to lose traction on the SERP’s, you should follow all these points. To make sure you are following the right path, always keep an eye over your ranking every now and then.
Even though it may have nothing to do with you, your client’s future SEO results affects your reputation as a web designer.
While clients don’t understand that 50% of their website’s search results depends on what happens after the design and development of a site, their future results are still your problem.
It is your reputation at stake, even though on-page SEO depends on the work done on the site after your part is done and dusted.
Image Credit: Quicksprout
Which is why this checklist is essential for your team; to do all you possibly can to help your clients get the best possible search results, so that they rave about you as a web designer.
The WordPress host handles the technical, security, administration and performance issues of the website. Support and technical help, is also a sought after commodity in the hosting scene. Given the amount of WordPress site out there, some hosting vendors have created solutions tailored made for WordPress users. WordPress specific hosts are highly optimized for the platform, and as such reduce the speed of the website which is a major search engine factor.
If you’re not designing the site from scratch, be sure to select a theme that is mobile friendly.
Categories must make sense to users, and should include keywords.
Make it easy for users to navigate the site, easily locating the information they want.
If the site is designed primarily for the user experience, it is likely to be search engine friendly.
The purpose of a website is to provide information to visitors, but it also needs to work to make visitors take some kind of action. Working with a copywriter who provides search engine friendly content is key.
Ensure any links use the same format. Inform the client for future content management.
The default WordPress permalink is not search engine or user friendly. The post name is usually recommended.
This prevents search engines from indexing pages that should not be found by visitors.
This may be necessary because spam domains can create big problems for your client’s website and which have search engine repercussions.
When you have pages with long content that need to be paginated, Google sometimes views these pages as duplicate content, for which the site is penalized.
WordPress creates a page for each image that is uploaded to the site. This may be bad for visitors and search engines who may consider the page to be low quality.
Another great option is Installing a WordPress button plugin to the site allows your client to setup mobile friendly buttons that convert more visitors to subscribers.
Adding an SEO plugin like Yoast that helps your client more easily create search engine friendly content.
Every time your client uploads an image to their site, it should be optimized for SEO with regards to speed. Using a plugin like WP Smush automatically “crunches” images to reduce speed.
This plugin will help your client easily monitor and track the site’s progress.
When a website has schema markup in place, the website may be displayed in search results with those eye catching yellow stars, plus visitors can see what the site is all about, where the company is, what it does, how much their stuff costs, plus plenty of other stuff. It’s like an online business card in search results.
Useful for users as something of a table of contents, the HTML sitemap is a map of the site which is added to a page. It also helps search engines make more sense of the website.
The XML sitemap helps search engines crawl a site more easily in order to index it. It can be created using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO.
Using a free online tool, validate the sitemap to ensure it’s error-free.
Force Google to “fetch” and index the site by requesting that it be indexed. Google does not guarantee that it will index any site faster, but it often does.
You can also request Bing to index the site faster than it would had you not requested it.
This is a comprehensive WordPress web designer’s SEO checklist and covers all areas related to web design from an SEO perspective. This includes:
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.
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:
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’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 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 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.
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:
It also includes:
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:
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.
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!
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.
Everyone who is using the internet and has little knowledge about SEO knows the importance of content. As we say in our industry,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read about how you can boost your video rankings on search engines or Most Googled terms of 2016.