Search Engine Optimization helps you generate traffic and qualified leads to your site. In the SEO world, things keep changing every time.
New strategies and trends are developed to keep marketers updated with the most recent changes in the major search engines. However, certain elements of SEO are timeless; they work today the same way they did 10 to 15 years before.
Here are five SEO elements:
1. Understanding the Needs of Users
Visitors to your website are your potential customers and have the power to elevate your business to a new level. So, it’s important that you focus on what they want so they can visit your website.
After knowing the needs of your users, you can publish content that adds value to them.
To achieve this, you should understand the questions they ask, how they ask these questions and their pain points.
To understand their needs better, start a list of their main needs, and translate the knowledge to your site. Present your product offers in a way that addresses the needs of your prospects and customers.
Create content that answers the users’ questions and format them in a natural and straightforward language. By doing this, you’ll become an incredible resource to users, and Google will acknowledge your efforts by placing your website at a spot where most users will see and visit it.
Use Relevant Keywords to Address the Needs of Users
To find out the popular search terms users type in search engines, try to type keywords and questions most asked by prospects into Google’s search bar. Google will reveal to you several related searches.
Using these search terms, update your web pages and blog topics.
To find keyword alternatives as well as the search volume related to them, use top tools, such as SEM Rush, Google Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, and more.
These tools give you stats on keyword suggestions, keyword competition, monthly search volume per keyword, and even keyword difficulty.
You need to use keywords with a high monthly search volume but less competition. Check on the keyword difficulty too, as some keywords are not easy to rank for.
Pick a mix of the most searched keywords and sprinkle them in your content. Do it naturally so you can please both your readers and search engines.
Remember not to stuff keywords in your pages too.
2. Content Marketing – One of the Key Elements of SEO
High-quality content is the lifeblood of your business, and content marketing is the best SEO strategy. Content goes beyond what you publish on your blog.
It encompasses videos, infographics, images, live chat, webinars, white papers, eBooks, how-to guides, press releases, social media posts, and more.
You should provide content not only on your website but also on website channels where your users spend most of their time. Use diverse content types to provide answers to your prospects’ questions. Understand their main problems and offer solutions.
Know the purpose or objective of each content piece you write. What is your content trying to achieve? What message are you putting across? And why should the readers care?
When writing content, always:
- Provide massive value to your readers.
- Answer their questions.
- Provide solutions to their problems
- Be useful
- Make the content rich and highly-relevant
- Ensure the content has sharable value
Get Valuable Content Ideas from Industry Influencers
One of the recommended ways to help you come up with valuable content for your audience is to network with experts in your industry and get useful content ideas from them.
Whether you meet these industry influencers at a business development conference, manufacturing plant, or an online forum, create a connection with these people.
Later, you can request to interview them where you ask them some of the hottest questions in the industry as you record the answers.
Afterward, publish the interview into a post. You could also request them to send you some of the frequently asked questions by customers and prospects and their responses. Use the information to create useful content for your audience.
Use Visual Content
Studies show that users consume photos and videos more than text. Therefore, create most of your content in a visual format to have the highest impact on your audience.
Whether it’s re-purposing some of your existing blog content into videos or explaining how your products work via videos, your content will have a lasting impact.
3. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing individual pages on your website, so they rank higher in search engines and attract relevant traffic. On-page SEO targets both the page’s HTML source code and content.
On-Page SEO Ranking Factors
If optimized correctly, on-page ranking factors can influence the ability of your page to rank in search engines.
The main on-page factors affecting the ranking in search engines include:
a. Content
A page’s content can determine its position in search engine results. It’s what users are most interested in, and it’s therefore, what search engines are concerned about.
As such, it’s essential that you create good content. From the standpoint of SEO, good content has two main attributes: supplies demand and is linkable.
Supplies a Demand
Like products in the global markets, content is determined by demand and supply. The best content provides the highest demand. In other words, it’s content that meets the needs of your audience and answers their questions.
Linkable
If people don’t link to your content, search engines are less likely to rank it. Consequently, the content won’t drive any traffic to its respective website
b. Title Tags
Meta title tags help search engines to understand what’s on your page, and they give visitors a first impression of your page.
These tags are used in three important places, including search engine results, social networks, and web browsers.
How to Write Good Title Tags
- Keep the length below 60 characters
- Don’t stuff them with keywords as it might hurt the user experience
- Give each page a unique title
- Put an essential keyword near the beginning of the title tag
- Write for your audience – Make the title catchy, accurate, and positive
c. URL
Keep the URL short and SEO-friendly.
A good URL contains the target keyword and doesn’t have query strings or search parameters. For example, www.example.com/dental-services/ is better than www.example.com/page2?=id15.
4. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO entails all marketing strategies that occur outside of the website, and have the potential to have a positive impact on search engine rankings.
Link building and exposing your brand to a relevant audience are the main off-page SEO strategies. We’ll focus on link building or building of backlinks.
Backlinks are golden, especially quality ones. If Google notes that other websites are linking to you, it shows that your site has something valuable and they may give it a bump in search results so most people can access it.
However, Google frowns upon black hat links (use of illegal SEO strategies to acquire backlinks), and if you employ such techniques, it might hurt your search engine rankings.
So, how do you build quality backlinks? Here are the most effective methods for link building:
- Guest posting
- Broken link building
- Forum commenting
- Social media posting
- Claiming unlinked mentions
- Blog commenting
- Video links
- Pitching infographics as a guest post or to infographic aggregation websites
Pro tip: Spy on your competitors’ backlinks to find out who’s linking back to them, and then explore a strategy to receive links from similar sources.
5. Social Signals
Social media marketing is critical in digital marketing efforts, and this is because it has myriad benefits, which include:
Increased Traffic
After Google’s Penguin update, most social media platforms changed their external links to no-follow. The move worried most webmasters and SEO expert, but these no-follow links continue to drive traffic.
Google likes it when social signals are driving traffic to your site. It lets Google know that people are talking about your site. However, the real value comes in when those social signals turn into social shares.
If your content is valuable, people will not only share, but they might also link to it.
Social Link Building
Social media links have supreme authority, especially if they come from reliable social media networks. To benefit from those links, ensure that your landing pages are properly optimized to attract and track traffic stemming from various social channels.
Go through your social bios and profiles to ensure they have links to the main website. If you have a YouTube video, link its description back to the website. Similarly, add a link to your Twitter’s profile.
Optimizing your social media accounts will boost your SEO efforts.
Increased Domain Authority
Brian Dean shows social signals as part of the ranking factors and that it can raise the overall authority of a website.
As your site receives more traffic from trusted social sites, it reinforces the perceived authority and value of your site.
Final Thoughts
If you would like to outrank the competition, reach out to more customers, and attract tons of traffic, you should stick with these five elements of SEO. To find out more useful tips for your SEO strategy browse some of our other posts.
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