What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that helps websites rank higher on search engine result pages(SERPs). SEO is an umbrella term for a wide range of strategies, techniques, tools, and tactics used to improve the visibility of a website in search engine rankings.
What are the Best Practices of Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization involves organic SEO, which includes natural or unpaid strategies, black hat SEO, which includes techniques that violate webmaster guidelines and result in penalization by the search engines, and grey hat SEO, which is a mix of both.
Here are some best practices for successful SEO:
-Use keywords throughout the content on your site
-Optimize your site with keywords
-Have unique content on your site that is updated often
-Use anchor text to link to other sites
-Create backlinks externally on other websites
What are the Biggest SEO Mistakes That Webmasters Make?
The most common mistakes that webmasters make are outdated links, duplicate content, low-quality content, slow website speed, and no social media presence.
Webmasters should not think of these SEO mistakes as something bad. They should think of them as something that helps them become better webmasters in the future.
Tips to Prevent Common Website Errors That Lead to Poor SEO Performance
- Ensure that your HTML code is optimized
- Make sure you have clear, concise, and accurate metadata on your website
- Ensure that your website is not over-optimized and avoid keyword stuffing
What is Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the practice of loading a web page with irrelevant keywords or phrases in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in search engines. This is done typically by placing the keywords at the beginning and end of sentences and repeating them over and over again throughout the page.
This is an old tactic that has been used for years and has been proven not to work. There are many ways that search engine crawlers detect this and penalize sites using it, such as keyword density checks, relevancy checks, duplicate content checks, and meta tags rules.
SEO Impact of Images on Blog Posts
The SEO impact of images on blog posts is a topic that has been debated for years. In this section, we will explore how images help improve the SEO of a blog post and some best practices to follow in order to take advantage of this.
In general, people are more likely to engage with blogs that include images. Research has shown that people are more likely to remember visual content than written content.
A study done by HubSpot found that posts with an image, on average, had 300% higher social shares than posts without one.
This is largely due to the fact that most social media platforms use visuals as their main way of displaying information. They rank better in feeds, which increases the likelihood of someone seeing them and sharing them with others or coming back later.
Images – Make Sure to Add Alt-Tags to Your Images
Images are a great way to illustrate a point and help readers understand the topic discussed in an article. However, if you don’t add an alt-tag, this can create confusion for those who cannot see the image. Adding proper alt-tags to your images ensures that all people with disabilities can understand the content on your site.
Most Important – Write Content That is Valuable to Those Searching
The way to do this is to create content that is valuable for the reader.
People might not always be looking for what they want to buy, but they will always be looking for what they want. Some of the best and well-written content will focus on solving a problem the ideal customers might be searching for on the internet.
Your content, in the form of articles, videos, and infographics, is like breadcrumbs on the internet. The search engines, in an effort to provide the best solutions for their customers, will see your content is thorough and complete.
One final thought before wrapping up, how long should an article be? Consistently, content that is longer (over 750 words) will perform better than shorter content. This is often justified by the thought that a shorter article is not in-depth enough to truly offer a solid and complete answer and will not make the first SERP page.
So, if you are going to use content to improve the SEO of your website and attract new customers, incorporate the tips in this article and don’t be afraid of giving too much. Because when we are searching for an answer and one article only teases us with a partial answer, what do we do? We leave and seek the one that provides a complete answer. The complete answer will win the SEO race.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, video and podcasts, to attract their customers ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
SwingPointMedia serves local businesses in Southern California and can be reached by calling 760-422-5176.
You are invited to also attend a free weekly presentation, providing you the tools and strategy to roll out your own content marketing program for your company, or see exactly what SwingPointMedia does for its clients to achieve success. It can be viewed live on SwingPointMedia’s YouTube channel, at 11 am pst.