If you are looking to start a new website, blog or optimize your website, you need to understand SEO to be successful.Knowing what goes into a successful SEO implementation and ways to build up your site, will turn your site into a major online destination and help you rank faster in search engines.
But what are a few of the ways you can make your site a profitable one?
In this article I will show you 10 SEO tips and tricks that will help you get more benefits from doing SEO and help you build a more profitable site.
1. Social Media
The single biggest thing you can do for your site and boost SEO is to have a social media presence.
Sites like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook and now Google+ are going to
be good avenues to expose your site and get people to notice your brand.
Social networks are also the golden goose for brand reputation management these days and for connecting with new audience.
Moreover, search engines like Google started to pay attention to social media and use data from social networks as rank signals.
2. Connect Your Accounts
If you have a Twitter account, a Facebook page and a Flickr account, you should connect all those accounts together.
This strategy can help with building up links improve your SEO and it
gives your audience more ways to find you and your content. For example, a Twitter follower could find your link on Twitter and follow it to Facebook.
Connecting accounts just gives you a wider reach and consolidates all the real followers into a small but profitable group, it also makes outreach much easier.
3. Analytics and Tracking
You need to understand where your clicks are coming from, who is referring them, what search queries drive the most traffic and which have potential to do so as well as how many ads are being clicked on.
Knowing where your traffic is coming from and how your audience
behaves, will help you shape your site into something that more people
will want to visit. So having a website without checking your Webmaster Tools Account or Google Analytics installed is a big no-no.
4. Keyword Research
One of the most important things you can do to improve SEO is to research your keywords extensively.
You can use keyword tools like Advanced Web Ranking, Scribe SEO or Google Keyword AdWords Tool to determine which words and phrases will be most effective. Finding a niche in the keyword world can create a unique place for your site that will have less competition.
Simply relying on keywords tools will unfortunately do you no good in most cases as you will be stuck with broad keyword matches, when we say thorough research we mean going deep and getting all the variations and long tails you can get your hands on.
5. Easy Sharing
Allow your users to instantly Tweet a link from your page, or like your content on Facebook.
This will help to create the backlinks and link juice that you need
to increase your following and increase your keyword rankings, not in
the direct way, but getting your content in front of thousands of eyes
can get you there. Also allow your readers to instantly follow you on social media sites with a simple click of the mouse. Doing so will let your readers to make a deeper connection with you and your content.
6. Internal Linking
Internal linking of your webpages can be an amazing factor from an SEO standpoint.
It can ensure that your pages will get spidered by Google and other
search engines. It can also help to increase the keyword rankings of a
given page within your site. Good internal linking can also help with increasing the relevance of certain keywords that you want emphasized on your site.
7. Relevant Content
If you are going to guarantee that you get good traffic, you should make good content.
Quality content is content that is engaging and relevant to your audience. Anything that sounds like it was designed for robots to find will result in your page not keeping your customers for very long, in other words it will increase your bounce rate and lower your quality score.
8. Navigation
Have
a table of contents at the top of your site where a reader can simply
click a link and navigate to the content that is most appealing to that
reader. Provide clear anchor text and think about adding a site map as well to enhance ease of navigation. Although this is way too basic I had to mention it, even though most web designers know onsite SEO, some tend to sacrifice usability for appeal, which can be a costly gamble.
9. Guest Posting and Networking
Contributing to other sites can be a good way to build links and get your name out there.
The more quality backlinks you can garner for your site, the better off you will be. Make sure that you are contributing to sites that have a lot of readers so you don’t spend time on a fruitless endeavor.
Also do comments, not in a sense where you will get comments as backlinks, but to engage with other readers and bloggers and get yourself known in the community, which is the fastest way for newcomers to get some traction and traffic.
10. Pay Attention to Usability
Including site search and 404 error templates on your page can make it easier for your user to navigate. A 404 occurs when a page cannot be found, but a customized 404 can allow your user to type what they are searching for manually and continue searching or even better, give them a fully customized 404 page with navigation and suggestions. It keeps the reader on your site.
When it comes down to it, we all need a site that contains quality content that can get a lot of links back to our pages.
Focusing on relevant keywords and using those keywords throughout the site as well as interacting with users is the only way to do business successfully.
Tracking our stats and analytics, connecting and making sure users are happy is the way to go, not just through backlinks, SEO starts from your website and then expands, remember that.