If You are trying to approach your SEO strategy with a view to improving it, there are a lot of ways that you can do so, and it’s something that is always possible to work on in some way or another. In fact, there are a number of rules of thumb that are worth bearing in mind as you do this, so you can ensure that you are carrying out the very best SEO possible. In this post, we are going to go through a number of these rules, which – when followed – will ensure that your SEO is as good as can be.
Be Sensible With Your Keywords
It is of course hugely important to have a good keyword strategy, as this is one of the major underpinnings of your SEO strategy. But a lot of people make the mistake of going over the top with keywords, stuffing far too many of them into their content. The result is copy that reads poorly and doesn’t actually provide good information for human beings. The truth is that good SEO is all about utilizing keywords sparingly, but effectively. Don’t go over the top with your keywords, and make sure that you are using them in a limited manner.
Go Wider On Your Keyword Research
From time to time, you are going to want to go further than simply trying to rank for the top keyword that your research has uncovered. In fact, there are many times when a keyword is far too crowded to be worthwhile getting into at all, as you are only going to struggle to compete for it if you try to do so yourself. It is sensible to go wider on your keyword research instead, so that you are much more likely to draw in the customers that you are looking for.
Create Compelling Content
Arguably the most important thing you can do on the whole with regard to SEO is to create content which is compelling and convincing in some manner or other. You want to genuinely help people by providing them with useful or engaging information, or entertain them in some manner. If you are not doing this, it won’t matter how many keywords you have in the content – you still won’t get high up in the search engine results. Make sure you are always creating compelling content if you really want to boost your SEO.
Keep An Eye On The SERPs
There are few metrics more important in SEO than the SERPs – the Search Engines Results Pages. You need to always have a good sense of what your ranking is on these pages, and it is therefore vital that you are keeping a close eye on them as best as you can. To make this easier and more efficient, you can use a SERP robot, which will automatically do it for you and keep you updated. However you do it, just be sure not to overlook it if you really want your SEO to be as good as you would hope.
Keep Links High-Quality
We all know that SEO relies upon having a lot of links, both backlinks and external ones. But it’s important that you are choosing those links which are genuinely high-quality, as otherwise you might struggle to keep the SEO moving in the direction you need it to move. If you are tempted at any point to go for low-quality links, you’ll want to ignore that temptation and opt instead for higher-quality ones. It would be better to have a handful of high-quality links than loads of low-quality ones, after all.
Update Your Site Regularly
A site that is kept updated on a regular basis is going to be much better for SEO purposes than one which is allowed to simply sit there doing nothing much. This is why so many websites have blogs attached to them: it is a relatively easy way to update the site on a regular basis without too much trouble. The more you do that, the more that Google and other search engines are going to trawl the site, so this is a really important thing to be aware of if you are trying to keep your SEO strong.
Follow Google’s Guidelines
Google actually has a few guidelines on their website concerning how to optimize your on-site SEO, and it would be foolish to ignore or overlook these. Some of them are similar to what we’ve looked at here already, but there are some really important pointers there which you might want to think about. If you follow their guidelines, you are going to be that much more likely to keep your site happy with Google, which is of course important for ensuring that your site is going to be powerful in SEO terms. This can't be overstated.
Site Speed Is Important
People often forget that the speed of a site is hugely important, and if you are overlooking it you might find that you will struggle to keep your website operating in the way you would ideally hope to. People are not going to hang around on your site for very long if the speed is too low, which will therefore alter your bounce ratio, which is one of the quickest ways to cause yourself trouble with your website’s SEO. So, keep those images and videos to a minimum, and speed up your site in whatever other ways you can. You’ll be glad you did.
Write Long Content
Again on the content front: the research shows that the most SEO-friendly content tends to be at least 750 words, and often longer. So you might want to make a point of keeping your content relatively long. For one thing, this often represents quality of information, as it shows that you have a lot to say about the topic at hand. But be careful not to stuff keywords, as we looked at above, as this can cause some real problems and it is not really what we are going for.
