Basic SEO Tips

These are the most common SEO tips & ways to get a high Search Engine Results Page or SERP ranking. But remember nothing changes overnight and you, need to work hard!

  1. CONTENT is King: Whatever you do, no matter how much search engine optimization you do, it’s worthless if you don’t have good content. Providing your user with unique and fresh content will help you to be in the race. But then again, these days a better saying would be “Content + SEO is King”!
  2. The Power of Keywords: Most of the SEO experts will advise you to use the most searched term as your keyword, but I would rather say use a keyword similar to the most searched one. Say if you choose a particular keyword on which competition is very high then there are chances that for that particular keyword you may not end up on Google’s 1st page. So do deep keyword research on what keyword you should select that best defines your blog and is the most common search term that a user may type in. It may sound difficult, but once you inculcate this as a habit, you will find that it comes easily!
  3. Get your blog indexed: Don’t wait for Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu or DuckDuckGo to crawl your website on their own, Submit your blog URL to Google,  Baidu and Bing. This will help you to get indexed faster. Try to write at least one post a day to get your post get indexed frequently.
  4. Analyze your blog for search term: This is a very important step, keep monitoring your search query traffic. You can use Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster and Yahoo webmaster for analyzing.
  5. Submit Sitemap: Don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and also to Baidu.
  6. Build quality backlinks: Try to build as much backlinks as you can, by link exchange, guest posting, forum signature links, etc. Organic backlinks from search engines take time to the generate, so keep trying these techniques to get faster results.
  7. Modify your permalink structure: Having numbers and queries like id=?123#4 in your URL is bad for SEO. Modify your permalink structure to make it relevant to your content. Best structure is one which contains your blog name followed by the post title like the one TWC has. They are called absolute URLs.
  8. Use rel=nofollow to all your affiliates link; this will help you to ‘conserve’ PR with you or what is referred to as preventing the passing of Link Juice.
  9. Use Google Analytics: Google Analytics is the best way to see where your traffic is coming from, with what keyword, from where. You can get most of the valuable information on your blog from Google Analytics.
  10. Use most targeted keywords as Anchor text: Interlinking within your blog surely helps, but it helps more when you link your blog by using hyperlinks which are the most targeted keywords.
  11. Interlinking your blog: The best advantage of interlinking your blog is that search engine crawler and your readers will spend a longer time at your blog navigating to those interlinked content.
  12. Improve Page load time: Google has announced that page load time is also one of the factors which will determine your Search Rankings. So try to use fewer scripts and if possible load them at the end of the page. Also try to optimize your images.
  13. Rethink before doing link exchange: Though link exchange will give you good number of back-links, never make a link exchange with a gambling sites or blogs who are blacklisted from Google or sites which have adult content, linking to them will harm your SEO. Stick to your niche; for example, if yours is a technology blog, exchange links with tech blogs.
  14. Frames: If possible keep frames away from your blog. Frames & SEO don’t mix!
  15. Theme Selection: Choose a well SEO optimized blog theme, with no errors. Themes from Woo, ThemeForest, etc. are well-optimized themes; not only for SEO but also for traffic and your reader’s point of view too.
  16. Duplicate Content: Google has a very strict policy for duplicate content, you don’t want to loose your all hard work because of it, so make sure you are not posting duplicate content again.
  17. Broken Links: They are not good for SEO. So before publishing your post check it once again. Use the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress
  18. Have Keywords in URL or have short URL: Keeping keyword in URL is the best that you can do for SEO. But if in case you are not able to do that try to have a short URL. Check out URL of this post; it contains three most targeted keywords. Always try to keep a keyword in your post title
  19. About meta tags: Meta tags for keywords and blog description are out. Most including Google do not consider it. It is said that Bing still considers it – but will very little weight.
  20. I repeat! Content IS King: Whatever you do, no matter how much search engine optimization you do, it’s worthless if you don’t have good content.
  21. If you are a WordPress blogger, use Yoast SEO Plugin. It’s good! One thing you should keep in mind is SEO takes time; you may not see any changes overnight, so don’t give up or try to overdo or stuff your post with a lot of keywords. Do your best, have some faith and give some time and you will be on the first or second page of Google or other search engines. Just stay focused. Check out our post on Useful tips for new bloggers next. Best of luck with your blog! Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide may also interest you.