As visual content becomes more and more prominent, it cannot be left out of SEO. Luckily it’s not time-consuming to optimise your images. For many content marketers, organic traffic earned through SEO is like a holiday bonus: It’s cool if it happens, but no one is planning their monthly budget around it. Bear in mind that your keyword or phrase should be the most frequently used term in the body text of any given webpage. This is called keyword density. However you shouldn’t overuse this signal – if you stuff the copy with keywords then your text won’t be readable and Google will likely penalise you for not writing for human readers. Apart from knowing which search terms people use, you need to know whether or not your idea for your post or page fits the desires and expectations of the people who use the search terms. The best way to find out whether or not your content fits these desires is to Google your proposed (sets of) keywords yourself. Although it may feel like Google is trying to make our jobs as inbound marketers more difficult, they ultimately want to provide the best user experience, which should be the goal of your website as well.
Branded anchor text
Higher rankings lead to more clicks and visits from interested searchers, and that search traffic is uniquely valuable because of its high relevancy and timeliness -- people search when they’re interested or ready to perform an action. Remember, great quality and lengthy content will work best, both for users and search engines. Studies have shown that long content consistently ranks higher than thin content. Consistency is crucial; maintain a regular publishing schedule. The quality and quantity of links you have pointing to your domain determines your overall authority, which in turn determines where you rank for various search queries. It seems like content should be engineered for an outcome. If you just start with an article and then ask yourself how to get traction to this everywhere, that doesn’t always work. Staying on top of SEO takes a lot of research and experimentation. Google’s algorithms are constantly updated so it’s important to stay tuned into the latest news. With this in mind, and a bit of practice, you can become your own SEO expert.
You need more diversity on your pages
Internal SEO isn’t just about keywords anymore; it’s about creating an authentic and engaging user experience. You might think that it is pointless to start learning SEO tips and tricks as the algorithms of search engines keep changing. That may be true to some extent but you’ll also notice that the points we will talk about below, have been there from the start and still play a vital role. Find out which channels are driving traffic to your competition . Once visitors are on your site, an important goal is to keep them on your site. You don’t want your visitors immediately bouncing back to Google once they have read something on your site. Think long term rather than short term. Short term will get you nowhere with SEO.
Today’s consumers want it all
Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant from SEO Hull, commented: "You’ve heard that blogging is good for SEO and maybe you even publish new posts regularly and share your posts on Twitter and Facebook. Problem is, you’re still not seeing any serious organic traffic from your blog and you’ve never managed to see a blog post rank anywhere near the heralded first page of Google search results, no matter how much you try to cram in those keywords. Where are you going wrong?" Do your maths - its one of the primary resources for this sort of thing. Its as simple as KS2 Maths. Really! Many years ago, Google put together its search quality team, which is responsible for ensuring users get the best possible user experience by making sure that key signals of quality websites align well with results on search engine pages. Their job description is straightforward “A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them — and in what order.” Because there has been quite some news about Google’s Penguin update and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. Cramming popular search terms into your blog isn’t enough anymore, businesses need to spend time creating meaningful copy. SEO is not just one technique, if you focus on just one thing you will not get the full benefits of SEO and you risk losing everything if Google change their algorithm again.
Has Google indexed you already?
If you are serious about your website, at least install Google Analytics or any other preferred statistics app. Collect data about your visitors, and find out what the customer journey on your website is. Find out what pages people like and which pages they dislike. You need to understand what keyword your target market use in order to find you. Have a brainstorm between you and your colleagues and come up with a list. Don’t just stop there though ask you customers, after all they are the ones looking for you! The true goal of SEO should be to engage customers and deliver conversions, and that cannot be accomplished with the artificial tactics used in traditional SEO campaigns. Linking out to well-respected authority sites will not only increase the relevancy of your content and time readers spend on your site, but it is also believed to send trust signals to Google and improve SEO ranking. Search engines drive dramatic quantities of focused traffic, comprising people intent on accomplishing their research and purchasing goals.
You need to go back to your market research
Authority relates to the link profile of any site. But not just the number of links. That bears little importance. In 2012, Google began to penalise any site found with bad backlinks and alongside this, it can ban your business from Google Adsense. This means that anyone with links gained unethically through black hat SEO tactics, for example, paid link building, overuse of affiliate links and duplicate content to get to the top of Google, now find themselves faced with a penalty. Do you publish new content exclusively for the enjoyment of your existing audience? Or do you want it to rank high in Google and bring new visitors to your site month after month? A good place to look for keywords is your internal site search. Offering visitors a search box within your site is good for users but also good for you, because it collects search query data. Sometimes you just can’t target a specific keyword on a product or service page of your website – it just won’t fit and look natural. In these instances you can always take advantage of having a blog. Do a quick Google search for that keyword and check what other pages rank.