Knowing that SEO is important to your online marketing efforts is one thing. Building an effective plan is another. Here are some fundamental strategic ways that you can optimize your website for search.
1. Properly Use Keywords
By now, you know that you should have keywords and use them on your web pages. But it’s important to know where to put them so that you can maximize the juice you get from the search engines for your efforts.
The keyword should appear in the title tag at least once. This is what readers see when your article pops onto the search engine’s results. You also want the keyword to be in your URL. This tells the search engine what your page is about. Include the keyword in the first 100 words of content. Some experts and tools such as Yoast prefer you to use the keyword in the first sentence. Either way, get to the point to tell readers what your article is about—the keyword.
Those are three key places to have the keyword. You’ll also want to use it in the text throughout but try not to overuse it as that can be considered keyword stuffing. A best practice would be to include it five to seven times per thousand words.
2. Avoid Pogo-Sticking With Relevant Content
Pogosticking is when users come to your site and bounce off it quickly. Search engines know how long users stay on a site and give more credibility to those that keep readers on longer. It’s more than just getting a click to your site that is important—you want to keep people on it.
If someone pogo-sticks on your site, that means they didn’t find the answer they were looking for and they return to the search results to find a better resource. When this happens frequently to your site, search engines will push you down in the SERP rankings.
So how do you prevent pogo-sticking? You write content that meets the needs of the keywords. Don’t beat around the bush and instead get to the point so that readers know you have relevant content and want to read more to find the answers they are looking for. For instance, you can make the content easy to read and more visually appealing by using bullet lists and headers to break up long passages of text.
3. Use Long-Tail Keywords To Enhance Ranking
Long-tail keywords take the keyword and expand it with a tail word or phrase. These keywords go a step further in search to specify exactly what users read. You can get a sense of long-tail keywords by typing in the keyword into the search query and seeing what other possible keywords populate in a drop-down list.
Incorporate long-tail keywords into the content to get better search results. By creating content that addresses long-tail keywords, you can ensure you are getting the specifics down that the reader wants to know about.
4. Eliminate Non-Performing Pages
Non-performing pages are often referred to as zombie pages, which simply exist but get no traffic. They don’t help your site ranking because they are deemed to not have useful content on them, so it’s ideal to get rid of them. This, in turn, will re-index your site on the search engine and help the search engine see that all of your content is relevant and helpful.
Use a tool such as Semrush to see what pages are getting traffic and which ones aren’t. Prune your site of those that aren’t doing anything for you. Search engines prefer a solid page of content that is relevant over many smaller pieces of content it can’t categorize and deem useful.
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5. Do an Industry Study To Get Backlinks
Remember that a backlink is a link coming from an outside website that recommends your site for content. It means that the website either used you as a source, or feels your website is a good source for further reading. But backlinks can be hard to get.
This is where doing an industry study can greatly help. When you conduct a study, you become an expert in the industry. The statistics you glean from the study can be used by others in the industry who will backlink to you as the source of the data. Though this may be time-consuming and may cost some money, it’s worth it in the end to become a leader in industry data.
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