Tips to make your site’s posts and pages SEO strong and traffic friendly.
Just about anyone can make a webpage or post a blog, but not everyone can SEO.
Today, the Internet is a well developed community with millions upon millions of websites, blogs and social media pages. Many of these pages are created by professionals while there are just as many if not more that are done by amateurs and enthusiasts. No matter what level of expertise, just about everyone making web pages wants to their work to rank well in the search engines. While this takes hard work and dedication, here are some tips that will help you make your website’s pages and blog posts have strong SEO qualities that will also encourage consistent traffic.
Find a niche and stick to it – Become your niche and write passionately about it, this will carry over to your readers. This will also encourage them to comment and share your post to others on social media. This will further your reach and visibility to others.
Write original posts often – This is the Internet, and the Internet’s purpose is to be a place of information and sharing. With that said, you need to give the Internet information to share if you expect to have traffic. The more you write, the more content you have to share, and the better you get at writing in general! Also, do not duplicate or copy the work of another, this is bad practice and will get you penalized in the search engines. So, make the effort and it will pay off!
Keep posts short, but not too short – The “goldilocks zone” for posts is right around 300 words. Thanks to Panda, Google will not index “thin content” aka short posts. Also, don’t write big blocks of text, this is can be viewed as “work” by your reader and will often discourage a reader. (you know you’re guilty of it!)
ALT Tags on images – Make sure each and every image on your site has an ALT tag that has keywords mixed in with a description of the photo. Don’t overdo keywords, but do this right and you will add a nice boost to your SEO score
Unique Page Titles – Each page and post should have a unique Title tag attribute. This will help the search engine better identify and index your site. Make sure your keyword is worked into the post as well so it coincides with the page or the post’s topic.
Balance your internal and external links – Links are important, so important that Google made an algorithm update to deal specifically with links called Penguin. You can’t have too many, too quick, and you can have too little for too long. You can’t have too many links internally, and the same goes for links that leave your site. Too many of any type and Google calls it SPAM, while a low number shows that a site is uninteresting, un-sharable and that the site owner is not a friendly Internet user that does not give credit to sources. Great advice: Place a “nofollow” TAG to 1/3 of all your links, especially multiple links that lead to the same destination. Links are tricky, but practice makes perfect.
Integrate comment boxes and social media sharing/commenting – Giving someway to let your readers engage your site will bring them back to keep the conversation going; this also adds to the SEO strength of your website as it adds more keywords and content to the topic.
These are just a few to the many items on an SEO checklist, there are so much and I plan to add more, but it is best to leave this as a series of tips rather than one long write up. Doing that very thing follows best practices as I’m keeping this short, but informative and I also give something for you, the reader, to return to.
