SEO Must Knows

There are many different SEO strategies and different variables that play into it. Let’s talk about the basics of SEO strategies, and things that you absolutely must know for SEO. SEO Must Knows podcast is here! If you haven’t checked out my “Intro to SEO” podcast, you should do that first!

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Keywords Everywhere is a tool that I use all the time to generate keyword lists.

• Keywords are key, as their name states.

  • Keywords Everywhere app is great!
    • Google Chrome and Firefox have it.
  • Long-tail Keywords vs. Short-tail Keywords
    • One word (short-tail) keywords tend to be competitive, long-tail not so much.
    • Long-tail keywords are most often phrases that people search for, and are often under-utilized.
  • Will talk more about keywords a lot more in a later podcast (or podcasts)!

Meta tags are codes in the HTML of your page.

• Meta Tags are simple, but important for SEO.

  • Meta tags are coding in the html of your pages that describe the content on the page.
  • Important ones to have:
    • Title: Title being displayed on Google.
      • Can be done through html, but Yoast SEO does the work for free.
    • Meta Description: Description below your meta title. Doesn’t affect SEO at all, but description is how you get people to click on your page.
    • Viewport: gives browser instructions to control pages dimensions/scaling.
      • Important for mobile devices.
    • Social Media: Tags that optimize sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and other social media platforms.
      • Can be very confusing, Yoast SEO does this for free, so you don’t have to.
  • Yoast pretty much does everything here for you. I could get into some complex HTML codes to do each of these things, but I’d rather save my breath and say download the Toast plugin if you haven’t already.

Content is the backbone of SEO!

• Content is the true backbone of SEO.

  • Until a few years ago, this was often left out of SEO strategies, though information has come down that this is perhaps the most important thing.
    • Huge articles, with lots of media tend to rank much better than small articles with better SEO strategies.
      • This is why Wikipedia seems to be at the top of Google for every term.
    • Quality content helps you rank higher, and helps get you more backlinks from other people, which also helps SEO.
    • Rules of Thumb:
      • Never less than 300 words.
      • At least 1 image per paragraph.
      • More is always better. No need to trim stuff that seems redundant, unless it is really bad.
  • It is important to have some “cornerstone content” posts of at least 900 words. Cornerstone content are pillar posts or pages for keywords that you want to rank high for.

 

Backlinks are very important too!

• Backlinks are the foundation that SEO is built on.

  • Backlinks are an incoming hyperlink from one page to another website.
  • Super important to your SEO ranking, maybe tied with content.
  • Quality over quantity 100% of the time.
    • More powerful sites provide much better backlinks.
  • Strategies:
    • Powerful posts that people quote from or talk about in their own articles.
    • Guest posts on other sites that let you link to your own site.
    • Make friends in your niche. Blogging really can be a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” game, and rather than competing with those in your niche, why not help each other.
    • Infographics are an awesome way. Putting infographics with your site’s name on them can seriously help out. Make an awesome graphic, and it won’t be too long before you notice people using it on their blog.

Images are super underrated!

 

• Images are underrated.

  • Having images that rank in Google can drive traffic to your site.
  • SEO Friendly Images is a great plugin for bumping your image SEO on Google.
  • Make sure to keep the keywords relevant to the images, and have the best image on the Search Engine (so people want to click on it).
  • Very underrated in terms of SEO.

Speed is one of the forgotten SEO Must Knows.

• Speed kills.

• • A common adage used in athletics, it applies to websites also. You will notice that the vast majority of higher ranked sites on Google will load within seconds, and it seems like a correlation exists there.
  • Speed is directly and indirectly involved in SEO on Google and Yahoo/Bing.
    • Direct: Robots crawl and check the loading time of your pages while factoring them into your ranking.
    • Indirect: Site performance is another part of Google’s SEO algorithm, and site performance and loading time of your site are heavily related to one another.
  • Don’t believe that speed is really this important? There is a report where Amazon talks about how every tenth (1/10) of a second its site is slower costs the company 1% of its customers! That is a crazy statistic for how little time that is.
    • W3 Total Cache is an awesome plugin to improve your site’s speed, and it’s free!

Things to Note This Year

 

Important to Note for This Year:

• Google Answers?
  • Google is trying to answer a great deal of search terms themselves.
  • If this continues to be the case, there comes importance to trying to become the sites that Google displays as the answers.
• Content is continuing its rise on importance.
• Voice Search’s importance
  • Siri, Alexa, and Google’s companion have increased the amount of voice searches vastly.
  • Long tail keywords are more useful with voice searching (more conversational search queries).

 

SEO Must Knows – UWP EP 5

Thank you for reading and/or listening to this UWP EP 5, and don’t forget to subscribe to us on iTunes, YouTube, and follow us on Twitter!

If you haven’t checked out our podcasts up to this point, find them in the Podcasting category on the sidebar!

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