These days, it’s hard to find legitimate content that will help your search engine optimization campaign reach its potential. Most of the time, the content available to you doesn’t really help you.
So below, I’ll provide eight tips that, when used effectively, will skyrocket your search engine rankings, often with little effort. Avoid shady techniques that could end up costing you a Google penalty.
Let’s begin our list with a little thinking:
- Think about what you’re offering – With search engine optimization, you must always keep in mind what a visitor can get from your website. Whether it’s reading free blog content or the opportunity to buy a product, make sure there is a reason why people should come and visit your site, and always remember it. This will help you focus your SEO content on the keywords that matter.
- Think about what people are looking for – A bit of an extension from the last tip; you must know what people are looking for during keyword research. What you’re offering and what potential subscribers/customers are looking for are rarely identical. However, you can make it so that some of your main keywords are what people are actually searching for. This works great with long-tail keywords, even after Google’s May Day update. For example, if you’re a car dealer because people looking for a car might search “affordable, safe cars,” make that become one of your keywords, even if some of your cars are expensive.
- Internal linking is key – How can you rank high in search engines without too many external links? Although most webmasters, even those involved in internet marketing and SEO, don’t know it, internal links are just as important as incoming links from external websites. Learn more about internal linking.
- Use anchor text – Any link can be more beneficial to your website by using anchor text. Anchor text is your actual link text. What does anchor text tell search engines? What keywords do you want to rank high for? For example, “Click here” is a poor anchor text link. Learn more about using anchor text effectively: Target Keywords Using Links.
- Your page titles aren’t supposed to be focused on users. – They are supposed to be focused on delivering your important keywords to search engines while still making sense to ordinary visitors. For example, a great page title would be “25 Search Engine Optimization Tips” and not “25 Tips That Will Skyrocket Your Search Engine Rankings”. Although the second title has more words, the first one puts a lot more focus on the biggest keyword: “Search Engine Optimization Tips.” So page titles are for search engines. Where do you focus on pulling on readers? Your post titles. (If this wasn’t obvious, your post titles don’t have to be and shouldn’t be the same as your page titles, although this takes more work to pull off.)
- Your post titles should contain keywords, too. – Although the page title is the place to focus on SEO, your post titles should be considered, too. So make sure your post titles have your most important post keywords while still attracting visitors.
- Don’t use dirty URLs – URLs are another opportunity to tell search engines what your page is about, and if you have a dirty permalink structure, URLs are just a missed opportunity. But know that they don’t have to be. With a little help from WordPress, you can get yourself some awesome URLs, which will be explained more in the next tip.
- Use keyword-rich URLs – Building upon Tip #7, it is essential to go beyond using clean URLs. For example, http://yourblog.com/post-123/ may be a clean URL, but it isn’t keyword-rich. On the other hand, http://yourblog.com/post-name-123/ is a good URL, and just http://yourblog.com/post-name/ is even better. To be concise, you should use your main page keywords within your URLs while still making the URL short and memorable.
