What is SEO actually? If you came here to read this article then you are probably familiar with the SEO basics. But, I will run through them one more time. SEO or Search Engine Optimization can be defined as some activity or program that will help you to improve search ranking of some website. But how does Google rank pages? To get a good rank on search engine your site must be recognized as authority page. That means that you have to make and publish quality content that will attract visitors and satisfy their needs. If you do that then they will share the link of your article or page on their own page, Twitter, Facebook or their blog.
A little later Google will recognize that link and you will get authority points. All you have to do next is to keep doing that same stuff over and over again and if you do it well your site will get good ranking. Sounds easy, right? But it can be hard if you don’t know what you are doing, that’s why you should inform yourself more and more about SEO and learn something new every day. This article is mainly created to give you some of the most important tips that will help you create a better optimized site but you should also learn what good SEO optimization can mean to you and what things to avoid when optimizing your site.
Benefits of SEO
To understand why SEO optimization is so important you can just look at what it brings. There are lots of benefits that SEO optimized website can bring and it would take a while to name them all, so here are some of the biggest:
- Traffic -> money – if you optimize your site well it will have a good ranking on search engines. That means that more and more people will visit your site and that means that more people will see your product, or see some advertisements that are placed on site to earn some money. So, good optimization leads to more traffic, and more traffic leads to more money, very simple.
- Cheap and effective – when you start optimizing your site the main goal is to attract people who want your product, services or information that you are offering on the site. Unlike most other marketing plans and strategies, SEO optimization actually targets your people, people who need something that your site offers. And if you learn how to do it perfectly then it can be very cheap, or even free.
- Creating a brand – if your site ends up on top ranking then it will be the first thing people see when they search for something related. That means that they will be able to connect your brand with the term or keyword they searched. Pages with good ranking get more trust from people then other, lower pages so your brand will be trusted.
Worst SEO techniques
If you search for SEO techniques and strategies on Google you will probably find a lot of them. There are some good techniques but there are also bad ones that may seem good but will actually destroy the reputation of your site with Google. Here are some techniques you should avoid.
- Guest blogging – guest blogging has been a SEO strategy for a long time but since these new Google algorithm updates it can do more harm to your site than good things. It is important to stop with large number of irrelevant guest posts just to get a link to your site. If you really want to create a guest post make sure that a site where you want to publish your post is relevant to your website. But the best advice would be to completely avoid guest blogging.
- Lots of links – there are lots of people who think that large number of backlinks will give a good ranking to their site. Well, all those people are wrong and probably don’t have a good ranking. You can create large number of backlinks or even buy them but that type of link building won’t do anything good for you. Link building is still one of the best ways to earn a good reputation with Google but try to create good and quality backlinks. One good backlinks is worth more than 100 bad backlinks.
- Links over content – another thing about link building is that it won’t help you a lot if you don’t have quality content. You can even get lots of quality backlinks but if your content is not good enough then your ranking won’t be so good. Focus on content quality first and then start building links.
Another very important thing is to maintain balance between quality content, link building, social media marketing and onsite optimization. If you do just one thing good and ignore the rest then you actually didn’t do anything. So, try to do all the stuff at the same time and do them well.
SEO survival tips
And slowly we reached the actual main point of our article. Here are five SEO survival tips that will help you to survive in the cruel world of search engines and will help you to get a good SEO rank. These five tips, of course, are not enough to make your site perfectly optimized but it should help you to see what you are doing wrong and where to start.
- User-Relevant Content
When you create your content keep in mind that you should include images and videos to it because research shows that it largely affects a visitor mood. You should also avoid putting advertisements directly into articles and avoid keyword stuffing. Another good advice is to use terms relevant to website content because that is very important SEO factor.
- Site Architecture
Our second survival tip is an advice to take care of your website architecture. That means that your site should always be updated with new information and new stuff, loading time of your website should be low and you should always include internal links to the site, but not too much of them.
- Backlinks
The third tip on our list is something I already mentioned, backlinks. Like I already said, it is important that all backlinks are natural and have a good quality because large number of bad backlinks won’t do any good.
- Social Signals
Another tip is to create a good architecture for social sharing to gain social signals. Social signals won’t be a large influence to your Google rank but in combination with other important SEO factors it will help you to get good ranking. For example, average social signals for some top sites are 1,690 for Facebook, 162 Tweets, 6 Pins and 143 Google+ Plus Ones.
- User signals
And the last SEO survival tip we should mention are user signals. User signals are very important part of SEO optimization and it can affect the ranking a lot. For example, one of the sites with highest ranking had a CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of 32% which is a lot. Website on 10th place had a CTR of 3%, you can notice the difference.
And that is mostly the all you should know for now. You can find more details about this 5 SEO survival tips and about the whole research in the infographic below. Good luck!
