SEO Success is to Serve Search Intent.
SEO is all about building page ranking. Page ranking is how high your page is in search results. This is on a page basis, but is effected by your domain as well.
Search engines want to find the most relevant and useful information for their users, so as content creators, we need to work with them. It is important to learn how to research search terms and how to build content to help people find the information they need – on your site.
You want to grab the audience with something as compelling as possible. This isn’t a place for exaggeration or deception, but make it as grabby as possible.
Some very successful SEO and Ad copy authors claim they spend as much time on the title and intro as they do on the rest of the article.
The fact is that people read articles, especially at first, by scanning them. It is important to break your content down into bite-sized parts. Organize with lots of headings and paragraphs of only one to a few sentences.
Linking to other parts of your site is surprisingly helpful for page ranking. They are used to help your reader find what they are looking for and are also important to let search engines crawl you site and make sense of it.
Luckily, it is easy and something you can control. Just create links to other relevant content on your site in a natural way. I often link to internal content using the natural flow of a phrase in the sentence. Just make sure it is clear and helpful to the reader.
People debate whether to open links in a new tab or let the users decide to do that themselves. I like to have my non-navigational links open in a new tab. When I read an article, I like to open the links I’m interested in as I read and then go back to read them after. This helps keep things tidy for the reader and it also gives search engines a tip that this is good content leading to other good content.
It is debatable as to whether links pointing from your website to other websites have a direct effect on your page ranking, but it isn’t really a debate as to whether they are valuable to you.
When you link to a relevant website from your content, it creates an increase in trust and relevancy to not only the search engines, but also among your peers. The websites you link to are likely to notice eventually.
More than that though, is the value it adds to your readers. The more value and trust you gain from your reader through great content, the more the search engines will notice that over time.
No one likes a slow loading page. It’s like bad audio in an otherwise beautiful video. People will absolutely disengage. They will turn it off and move on.
Search engines will dump you in a heartbeat if they detect slow loading pages. That means falling into the abyss of page ranking even if everything else is world-class content.
Fortunately, there are all sorts of ways to test and improve on page speed even when using an economy shared hosting.
For improvements, there is the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress. This is probably the single most effective way to speed up your entire site. I also like to use a graphics compression plugin such as Smush.
There are plenty of options, but Google PageSpeed Insights is all I need. If you have analytics set up, you will get information from that as well, but PageSpeed Insights will give you details and actionable items so you can work on fixing the problems.
It might be better called “back-link building” as we are looking to get links from other high authority or popular sites pointing back to content on our site. There are no easy ways to do this and it will almost certainly require outreach.
This is a huge topic and a very important one as this is likely the most powerful way to climb the page ranks. Search engines weigh backlinks more heavily because they are the hardest to manipulate and they are also the best social proof.
Guest blogging is a great way. Lots of bloggers are very busy and if you reach out with really great content that benefits them, they will often take it and of course link back to you. This is an excellent way to do it because you will be likely getting links from very relevant sites.
Create linkable assets. This can be a really good way to keep fresh links coming your way.
A linkable asset is a piece of content, such as a special calculator or other tool, that is linked to from another site because it adds value to them in some way. This helps a lot in building backlinks, which is very important to increasing page rank.
Unfortunately, you can’t just create linkable assets and expect people to notice. You need to reach out to the other sites to let them know you have helpful content they may be interested in. Just think of it as an opportunity to network and connect with someone else in your field. Try to use the opportunity to learn more about how you can create content they would want to link out to.
SEO work is intended to be a way to build organic traffic, but even if you are seeing some good results, it might be a good idea to do some promoting anyway through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or ads.
Never let your content get stale. This is the internet. Keep an eye on all of it and regularly update it as needed to keep it as fresh as possible. If you are trying to rank, then you should lead the way to top quality, relevant content.
Update the content, change the publish date to the current day and publish it again.
Don’t let old useless and dead pages drag your domain down. Regularly go through old content and either redirect in to better content or simply delete it so the search engines stop crawling it.