New to search engine optimation? Don’t know where to start? I’ve rounded up 56 helpful SEO tips for beginners in 2020!
But before we get to the tips, here are the answers to some common questions you may have if you’re new to SEO.
If you’re not a complete beginner and you just want to read the tips, scroll down or click here to go straight to the SEO tips!
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means optimizing your website or individual web pages for organic search results.
What Is the Purpose of Search Engine Optimization?
The objective of search engine optimization is to get more traffic to your website, and specifically, high quality traffic that is genuinely interested in the content, information, services or products featured on your website.
What Is On-Page SEO?
On Page SEO includes anything you do on your website or blog that improves the ability for search engines to choose your site based on customer searches as one of the potential sites that your audience should look at for information.
What Are the Most Important On-Page SEO Ranking Factors?
Although it’s impossible to know exactly how the Google search algorithm works and which of the following factors are most important, the web pages that rank on page one typically adhere to the following guidelines, since the top ranking pages have the following characteristics in common.
Optimize your URLs to include keywords and to be short and pretty. The entire title doesn’t have to be the URL.
Instead, the primary keywords that you use should comprise your URL for that page or post.
Understand that body text is also important because your keyword should show up within the first 100 characters of body text after any heading is used. This helps confirm the topic that the post is about matches the title.
Things you mention early on should indicate to search engines what your content is about.
Within any one blog post you may have multiple H2, H3, H4 and so forth tags for headings and subheadings other than the post title. Just be sure you only have one H1 tag per page or post.
The use of these tags can make a lot of difference when optimizing to be found in search results.
Make suer your site is responsive so it can work on both mobile and desktop.
If your site doesn’t work on all types of browsers, it’s not responsive.
If you want the search engine bots to crawl more of your site, create links to related pages and posts within your content.
Links from your content to other content on your site are just important as external links.
Using high-quality outbound links also signals to the search engines (and your audience) that your information is quality information that is accurate. If you use links that have been shown to be low-quality, it can negatively impact your optimization efforts.
Make sure your site moves fast. If it doesn’t load fast find someone who can help figure out why. There is a lot of technical information about fast loading sites that is difficult to understand that has to do with compressing images, how many images you add, the types of images and so forth.
As far as page loading speed is concerned, the faster your page loads, the better.
Ensure that you make it easy for your audience to share what they love.
Social sharing by others is part of off-page SEO because it can help build external links to your content —
but adding social sharing buttons to make it easier for people to share your content and build backlinks is a good on-page SEO tactic.
Include long form (or epic) content that can serve as cornerstone content for your audience.
When you do that, it’s also important to use more title tags (H2, H3, etc.) than just the H1 title since the content is so long.
When you understand how on-page SEO works you can quickly understand how it also helps your audience outside of search engines.
It makes your content easier to read, understand, and browse. It makes it easier to tell others about it and makes it overall more user-friendly than if you didn’t use any type of SEO at all.
An easy to navigate site helps your users find content of interest and helps the search engines crawl your site.
Search engines give a secure website (a site with an SSL Certificate) a better ranking.
1. Think About Google’s Incentives As a Company
For SEO beginners, the best place to start is to think about Google’s incentives as a company. They want to serve the best search results so that users keep going back to them when they are looking for information. Otherwise, they don’t have a business.
So, they are constantly searching for signals about what is the best answer to a given query. This framework helps to understand why all of the many facets of SEO make sense, from the appropriate anchor text to use for internal links to the right H1 tags to use for your next article.
Phil Strazzulla | SelectSoftware
Phil Strazzulla is the founder of SelectSoftware, which helps HR buy the right software through free online guides.
2. Do Better Keyword Research
So absolutely, the one piece of advice that I wish someone had given me originally, was that I would need to do better keyword research.
I spent over a year writing a ton of interesting, insightful blog entries that would be great for those within the industry. But, the number of consumers looking for those posts: zero. Or approaching it.
So I learned how to use Google’s keyword tool, as well as using other services like ahrefs to see how my competitors were driving traffic and which terms were most beneficial.
As it turns out, a simple search such as “how many ounces in a glass of wine?” yields almost 7,000 month searches. Plus, it was relatively easy to rank for.
While there is a ton of great link building advice, doing better keyword research makes the whole thing so much easier.
Mark Aselstine | Uncorked Ventures
Mark Aselstine is the founder of Uncorked Ventures.
3. Focus on Producing Quality Content
The best SEO tip I’ll give to a beginner is to focus a lot in producing quality content that satisfies users and search intent.u00a0 In doing that – you need to first of all carry out a keyword research for every post you plan writing about.
Keyword is the most important task every blogger and SEO should do before thinking of writing contents. Without that there’s no way to tell if you’ll be getting traffic or not. You wouldn’t know what search term people are actually searching. It’ll be like shooting in the blind and hoping for a hit. This is the genesis of every SEO strategy.
4. Make Sure Your Internal Linking Structure Is Solid
Another great SEO tip is make sure your internal linking structure is solid. Make sure you add internal links to your pages and posts, especially from the old posts to the new ones. This helps for quick and easy crawling by search bots.
If you have a page that’s been stuck in the second or third page of Google for whatever reason you can’t tell – then go to a high ranking post and link that post from there. Just make sure to link where necessary on your site. It helps the user, helps the search crawlers and helps your site as well by increasing the time on site. No doubt it also leads to more potential conversions.
5. Monitor Your Site Speed
I can’t round this up without mentioning site speed. This is a HUGE ranking factor. You don’t need to overthink this. Just make sure you’re using a good host, content delivery network (CDN), image compression tool, Cache plugin and reduce the amount of plugins you have on your site. Delete the inactive ones also.
Khris Steven | Khris Digital
Khris Steven is an online marketer and a blogger who derives passion in helping people serve more and make impact via online mediums.
5. Websites Must Be Optimized For Voice Search
Voice user interface allows users to interact with websites through voice commands so it adds usability and functionality to your site making it accessible to all users including those with limitations and disabilities.
It is not just about complying with the ADA, responsible web design and corporate social responsibility goals but it is also good for the bottom line by reaching a broader audience.
Inclusion is the right thing to do and it is good for business. One key trend to address and tackle to grow your audience today is that smart speakers and voice search are growing in importance so being able to optimize for voice search will be key to maximize the marketing and advertising opportunities on Siri, Alexa, Google Home, etc.
Brands that perfect the branded skill with more customer-friendly, less invasive ads are going to win big. Are you prepared when customers ask for help like Alexa u201casks Nestle for an oatmeal cookie recipeu201d or u201cWhat is the best Mexican restaurant in Boston?u201d. If not you are missing a big opportunity!
There are always new shiny objects in marketing to distract you, social media and technology are 24/7 but SEO is here to stay whether it is via Google or voice. You get one chance to make a great first impression so if you want to improve the impression you are making and give your business a boost make sure your site is optimized.
6. Mobile UX Determines Your Ranking
As a business you must have a website and I’d argue businesses always need SEO because the whole point of having a website is to make it easy for customers to find you.
Being invisible online is a terrible strategy so making sure your site is keyword rich, mobile friendly, loads quickly and produces meaningful content today is the price of entry.
That also happens to be a great foundation for effective SEO. Your home page is the most important to hook in prospective clients and customers if it does not load quickly or they do not see something that grabs their attention the opportunity will be lost. It must include enough of your value proposition to start the conversation so they will click further to learn more about your product or service.
The goal is to make the navigation intuitive and easy so they follow the breadcrumbs to get their questions answered or problems solved. When your brand foundation is strong the metrics show that you shorten the sales cycle and people spend more time on your site.
Paige Arnof-Fenn | Mavens&Moguls
Paige Arnof-Fenn is the founder & CEO of global marketing and branding firm Mavens & Moguls based in Cambridge, MA. Her clients include Microsoft, Virgin, The New York Times Company, Colgate, venture-backed startups as well as non profit organizations.
7. SEO Starts With Your Overall Marketing Strategy, Which Needs to Be Driven by the Overall Business Strategy
Small businesses ($2m to $75m in revenues) that need SEO to drive B2B lead generation and product sales first need to understand that SEO starts with your overall marketing strategy, which needs to be driven by the overall business strategy. Then they need to understand that 80% of SEO is strategic copywriting.
Here’s a summary of what needs to happen for SEO to be most effective from my 15 years of experience with it:
- Vision and 5-year business plan: using the Entrepreneurship Operating System (EOS) is a great process for establishing both and keeping on track
- Marketing strategy and plan: identifies the right mix of inbound and outbound marketing to achieve the company’s sales and other goals with clear target markets identified
- Keyword research: using the Google Ads Keyword Tool
- Optimize all current website content: page names/folders/URLs (even the domain), titles, meta descriptions, H1 headings (one per page/blog), other headings, and calls-to-action (ideally in the form of a button)
- Earning links from high Page Rank sites (at least 4/10 sites): PageRank for any site can be displayed using Page Rank checker.
Note: Page Rank checker is a free service to check Googleu2122 page rank instantly via online PR checker.
Sean Parnell | Innovaxis Marketing
Sean Parnell is the President of Innovaxis Marketing.
8. Everything in SEO Boils Down to Content and Backlinks
Great content is built around the needs of your customers, and good content tends to get shared the most.
If you are trying to make high-quality content, think about the problems and pain points of your customers. People go to Google to ask questions, and SEO revolves around offering the best answers in search engines.
Backlinks are the other piece of SEO and you can earn backlinks by building great content. Creativity wins the day here and you should think about what your audience’s audience searches for and create content for their needs. This will ensure your audience shares your content since it is catered to their audience – this makes them look good and helps you rank.
Chris Giarratana | StrategyBeam
Chris Giarratana is the co-founder of StrategyBeam, an Orlando marketing agency, where he works with small businesses. He specializes in SEO marketing, Google AdWords management, and copywriting services.
9. Really Think About Your End User When You Are Writing Your Content
If I could give one piece of advice to someone trying to do SEO it would be to really think about your end user when you are writing your content. If you are simply writing content in order to try to please the Google gods, you will never succeed.
It is ultimately your readers that allow you to rank high by sticking to your pages when they land on them and genuinely being interested to click around your site.
Nathaniel Hovsepian | The Expert Home Buyers
Nathaniel Hovsepian is the owner of The Expert Home Buyers, which is one of the premier home buying companies in the CSRA.
Simple SEO Strategies in 2020 and Beyond
When it comes to increasing organic rankings, I recommend the following relatively simple strategies in 2020 and beyond:
10. Create and optimize relevant content.
Ensure your website has at least 250 words on every page and that deeper content pages have 2,000-3,000 words, as Google loves deep content. Ensure those pages each have customized, relevant title and META descriptions to maximize rankings and clicks from search results.
11. Create and optimize multimedia content.
Google loves multimedia, because humans love multimedia. Give them what they want, with video, audio/podcasts, animated gifs and images, embedded in as many pages on your website as is prudent. Utilize ALT tags and text surrounding the media to describe the content so Google has more context and will be more likely to rank it.
12. Add structure.
Used structured markup (schema) to ensure your classes and related product pages as well as business information (name, address, phone number), is properly formatted for Google and other engines to index properly. This is especially vital for emerging trends like voice search, not just local SEO. This is a minor aspect.
13. Optimize images.
Google images is the second largest search engine by volume (bigger than YouTube even). Optimizing your product and service images with ALT text is essential to ensuring they rank in product-related images searches. The images link to the product pages where interested parties can purchase easily. Additionally, images are a powerful revenue opportunity via shopping capabilities on social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest.
Kent Lewis | Anvil Media, Inc.
As President and Founder of Anvil Media, Inc., Kent Lewis is responsible for ensuring the company is living its mission and vision by managing overall corporate strategy, including operations, business development, sales and marketing
14. Ensure Your Website Can Be Crawled and Indexed
One of the first things new SEO strategists should focus on is ensuring that their websites can be crawled and indexed by search engines.
15. Leverage Google and Bing Webmaster Tools
After ensuring that their website is valid and running, strategists should leverage webmaster tools offered by Google and Bing. These tools allow a website owner to submit a website’s sitemaps and RSS feeds directly to the search engines for greater visibility and indexing.
Webmaster tools also provide the opportunity for website owners to discover errors hindering the indexing of their pages, allowing a proactive and quick response to some of those issues. Finally, the tools also leverage analytics and engagement data to gauge a website’s performance.
Simply put, webmaster tools are one of the best things new professionals could use in the process of increasing their site’s SEO.
Osiris Parikh | Summit Mindfulness
Osiris Parikh is the Marketing Coordinator for Summit Mindfulness. He is an SEO fanatic and a frequent contributor to Databox's business blog. He holds several educational technology certifications from Microsoft, Apple and Common Sense Media.
16. Target Keywords Where You Can Do The Best Job of Satisfying a Searchers Query
For beginner SEOs and site owners, a great mindset to have is target keywords where you can do the best job of satisfying a searchers query. These will no question be longer-term keywords, which will have lower demand. However, the idea is to train Google that you’re a website that knows how to satisfy searcher intent. When your domain authority grows, this puts your site in a better position to start ranking for high-quality keywords.
The other benefit this has is it trains you and your team to become better content marketers yourself. As it’s this user-first mindset that we’ve found it takes to win long-term in SEO.
As far as finding these keywords, the most important thing you can do is look at the SERPs for the keyword you’re going after. Find keywords that have a lot of low-quality domains and don’t directly answer the user question. Then, look at the content itself, to make sure you can indeed creating something that’s much better.
R.J. Weiss | The Ways to Wealth
R.J. Weiss is a CFPu00ae and founder of the personal finance site The Ways to Wealth.
17. Use HARO to Connect with Reporters Who Need Experts
Use HARO to connect with reporters who need experts to consult on topics they are writing about. This is as easy as signing up (free) and check your email twice a day. You have to respond quickly otherwise your email may get lost in the flood of emails the reporters receive.
I also spend more time writing informative blog posts that wind up generate incoming links from other blogs who are researching the topic I’ve already written about. The trick is to be thorough when writing your content and have a topic in mind.
Joe Balestrino | JoeBalestrino.com
Joe has over 17 years in online marketing, SEO and paid search (SEM). He's the author of several books, one of them being a Guide to SEM marketing for eCommerce sites on Amazon.
18. Do your keyword research
Use tools like KWfinder or Ahrefs to find suggested keywords or just grab them from a key competitor. SEO takes six to twelve months, sometimes years on a competitive term, and you don’t want to put that kind of time on a term that doesn’t bring you the kind of value that you’re looking for, whether that’s a conversion, a sale, or a new audience.
19. Build A High Quality Website
Build a quality website – a site that is user friendly and has a great UI. It needs to be something that people are going to engage with and want to stay on, and ultimately want to contact you, which means you want to build a certain degree of trust. You need to ensure that your website is well structured, easily crawlable by the search engines, and usually you want to try to create some different pages to talk about the different products and services you offer, so that each of those can be a feature piece for each of the services that you’re going to be offering to your inclines.
20. Onsite Optimizationu00a0
Ensure that your site is well crawlable. There are great tools out there to make sure that it is crawlable. Register for webmaster tools, because Google will actually tell you if they’re hitting errors, plus give you lots of other information.
21. Set Up At Least One Social Media Platform
One of the best ways to help promote and syndicate that content is to use social media, so make sure that you set up at least one social media platform and use it. That’s the operative word, because all too often people will create various profiles – Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, you name it. However, without actually using the profile it can make your site/brand look bad (if you’ve only ever had one post and it was three years ago). Doing it right may even earn you some links back to your website, so that you improve your rankings in the search engines.
22. Have Patience
Search engine optimization is a long-term process. There are lots of studies that will show the return on investment is extremely high from SEO. Put another way, the cost per lead that you can acquire using search engine optimization as an inbound marketing approach is extremely attractive, but it does not happen quickly. So, if you need traffic right away, if you
don’t sell customers today or you’ll go out of business, you don’t want to do SEO. You want to do pay per click or something more aggressive that will get leads. But, if you’re in it for the long haul this approach is very successful and the ROI will be well worth it.
Justin Lubomirsky | Titan SEO Group
We're a savvy group of SEO experts who help enable companies to grow their business, increase traffic to their site, and improve their ROI.
23. Optimize Your Images Well
SEO optimization is so important when you are hoping to drive new customers to your site. That’s why you have to be sure that you take advantage of every opportunity to get you ever closer to that coveted Google Page 1. However, it’s a little different for each niche. .
One quick thing that you can do to your existing blogs or main pages is to be sure to give your images a little love. Keep them compressed (preferably under 100 kb), and always be sure to include your main keyword in the alt text. It may sound simple, but it works!
This way, even your images may begin to work for you to help with your rankings. Plus, images can be very important when it comes to making decisions for any type of educational or care facility. You or your child will spend so much time there that it will be imperative to see the surroundings, classrooms and other public spaces.
How well they are up kept can really give you a step up on the competition.
Angela Ash | Flow SEO
Angela Ash is an expert content writer, editor and marketer, and she works with Flow SEO , founded by well-known SEO specialist, Viola Eva. She writes on a multitude of topics, but places a special importance on content marketing, SEO, productivity and business
applications.
24. Update your content regularly
Update your content on a regular basis. Nobody wants to read outdated, inaccurate information and Google knows that.
Example: List of top 10 songs from 2015 isn’ accurate anymore. It’s almost 2020 now and many new great songs have been released in the meantime.
25. Be active on Quora to establish yourself as an authority
For the link building, I would suggest an unconventional way – Quora. Be active on Quora, show your expertise, establish yourself as an authority on subject matter and links will come naturally. Personally, I got dozens of links from bloggers that have read my Quora answers.
Peter Koch
Peter Koch is a blogger at DollarSanity.com.
SEO Tips For Beginners To Jumpstart Your Website Traffic
Marketing with SEO is vital for websites today. If you have been directed to investigate SEO or have decided to quell your curiosity, you have found a great resource in this article. It is the most effective way to boost the traffic to your website and gain loyal visitors.
26. Changing from AP (Associated Press) style to SEO style can optimize your search engine results.
AP style is often associated with journalism. In SEO style, you want to use relevant keywords wherever and whenever they are a logical choice while keeping your article flow intact. As search engines work partly by locating keywords and evaluating their density, this should improve your search engine rankings.
27. Check out the competitions’ HTML code.
This gives you information about how they use SEO on their website, and which keywords they use. While you might not wish to imitate their methods, this bit of sleuthing can make you think of other keywords and things to try.
28. Find a name for your domain that relates perfectly to your product and is easily remembered.
Having a domain name that’s simple to say and easy to remember will cause people to be better able to trace your content from networking sites like Youtube directly to your specific website.
29. Ask reputable companies such as non-profits to provide links to your web site.
Any reputable site that links to your website will help you greatly when it comes to ranking with search engines. Provide high-quality information that will entice reliable websites to want to feature your site. Add content that these types of organizations find worthy and useful.
30. Optimizing your site for search engines is the best way to drive traffic to your site.
Any website, old or new, can benefit from the tips in this article. The tips stated above should help you learn how to being exploring the different marketing options available to you.
Brian Coulanges | Guerrilla Insights
Brian Coulanges is the CEO of Guerrilla Insights. Brian Coulanges is an expert in the Digital Marketing industry with over 7 Years of experience! Brian has successfully taken dozens of small businesses to compete with the largest industry leaders.
31. Offer expert blog content for free
My favourite strategy for link-building, is to find blog posts about a particular topic we are experts of (in DashThis’ case, reporting & digital marketing) that I might have an interesting take on. I write a little content, let’s say a short paragraph with a tip or new take on the topic that’s covered in the article and I send it to the author. I simply tell the author that I had an interesting new take on their article and that I’d be glad, if they add my content, that they link back to our website in order to credit us.
It usually works very well, since we offer content for free, that adds value to their article, and it doesn’t cost them too much to simply credit the new content they add to whoever wrote it.
Marie Lamonde | DashThis
Marie is a content marketing specialist at DashThis, she usually writes about SEO, digital marketing, and reporting, and loves to give her fellow marketers some time-saving tips.
32. Check for common on page SEO mistakes
My best SEO tip for beginners is to regularly do a mini blog audit in order to identify common on page SEO mistakes. To do so, simply search “site:yoursite.com” in Google and look at the results.
- .Do you notice any weird urls?
- Are there pages that contain HTTP even though your website uses HTTPS only?
- Are there pages that appear with WWW even though you don’t use WWW?
This simple check can help you quickly identify major problems and fix them before it’s too late. This is a check I run for all my blogs every month and it actually helped me identify malware on a client’s blog before Google had a chance to find it and blacklist her blog. You can find more detail on these checks here.
Benjamin Houy | Grow With Less
Benjamin Houy is the founder of Grow With Less, a marketing training company that helps overwhelmed small business owners get more traffic to their website. He is also the creator of French Together, a blog that helps 282,375 monthly visitors learn French.
33. Use H2 headings and include related keywords
One SEO tip for beginners is to start using h2 headings to break out your article and include related keywords you want to rank for. Many beginners don’t know basic HTML, but simply learning just how to implement h2 tags can help them structure their articles much better for users and the SEO benefit of ranking for a few of the header keywords.
Stacy Caprio | Accelerated Growth Marketing
Stacy Caprio is the founder of Accelerated Growth Marketing. For fun, she grows her 1,000,000+ pageview per month portfolio of websites, run, read, play with dogs.
34. Let Google Auto Fill Be Your Best Friend
When you know what you’re going to write about, find your u201ckeywordsu201d by starting a Google search and seeing what people are looking for by what words show up automatically.
Along those lines, when you do find a keyword, scroll to the bottom of the google search page to see what similar keywords people are searching for. u201cSearches related to [your search]u201d is where you’ll find that information.
Now, use those keywords in your title and headings. You want to write for the people. You need to create content that meets what they’re looking for.
By Google giving a glimpse into that, they’re helping you to be able to meet the public’s needs more directly than if you just guessed on your own and picked something that sounded good.
When you do a search of your keywords, read the top search results. Your goal is to be one of those top results, so study what they do and how they cover the topic. For example, if the top ten results have certain material that overlaps, consider that important information. You won’t want to miss covering that aspect because your readers are probably desiring you to cover it.
Melanie Musson | Expert Insurance Reviews
Melanie Musson is a content marketing specialist at ExpertInsuranceReviews.com.
She enjoys studying the ever-changing world of SEO.
35. Remember The Human Element
One of the best pieces of advice I can offer for those just beginning to work with SEO is to remember the human element.
Many fall into the trap of focusing solely around keywords and search engines instead of remembering what they really want to accomplish with their site: more viewers.
Choosing to focus more on usable and relatable content can lead more users to your site than chasing users with single keywords. It’s important to remember that the point of search engines is to provide users with practical and relevant content.
Things like long-tail keywords will help search engines direct traffic to you while also giving users what they need. Any content you do create should reflect your brand, not your hopes of manipulating algorithms.
SEO copywriting is dependent on users finding sites that help with their queries. Do your best to provide content that engages with users, highlights your brand and is valuable enough to be promoted, and soon you’ll see your site climb the rankings.
Gary Stevens | Hosting Canada
Gary Stevens is the owner of Hosting Canada and runs a front-end web development agency.
He's a full time blockchain geek and a volunteer worker for the Ethereum foundation as well as an active Github contributor.
36. Understand your Audience
Understanding your audience is an essential foundation when learning SEO. Knowing their search intent, the reason behind every search, is important as it can be your guide for future site content and SEO choices. Optimizing for search intent can potentially bring more traffic to your site and increase conversion rate.
SEO tools, such as the Google Search Console, can help you do this. This free yet comprehensive tool can help you analyze your search traffic, such as where users first land on your site, what keywords they use to get there.
It will also show your site health and other important data such as improvements you need to do with your HTML, your site’s mobile usability and the site’s crawl errors, among other things
37. Understand Key Search Factors
Another foundation you could build is by understanding key factors assigned by Google that is essential on gauging your site’s performance in search and where ranks on search results pages or SERPs. These key factors, such as CTR, can help you assess your site’s relevance.
Google Search Console’s Search Analytics can help you with this as well. It’s a handy tool so I suggest learning how to use it.
Kenny Trinh | Netbooknews
Kenny Trinh is the editor of a tech review publication that has helped thousands of readers gain knowledge around all kinds of tech subjects.
38. Thoroughly Understand The Subject You’re Writing Aboutu00a0u00a0
To show up high on search results you have to be an authoritative and credible source on whatever subject matter you’re writing about.
Produce valuable, insightful and comprehensive content on your subject.
UNDERSTAND WHO YOU’RE WRITING IT FOR (YOUR AUDIENCE)
All content is created for an audience.
Research the real content needs of that audience and make sure you’re providing that. If you can make your content the one-stop resource for what the users are looking for, you’ll do well.
39. Think About Local Search
Send signals to the search engines about where your business is located, especially if you have a brick and mortar establishment.
This can be done with cues in your content, as well as with structured metadata and other methods that communicate the necessary information to search engines.
Search engines like to return the most relevant results to users and will return the most geo-relevant result if they determine it’s a situation where proximity is important, for example, somebody searching for a restaurant or a physical store.
Google is more likely to return a search result from a business that’s around the corner than one that’s three hundred miles away. Employ the keywords and semantic variations of that describe your subject.
Think about the questions and queries that your users will have for your content, as well as the contexts within which your users will be interacting with it.
Write about your subject in the ways your audience would search for it and answer all the questions they would have about it.
40. Backlinks Are Very Important Too
The links pointing back to your website increase your Domain authority, which is an indicator of how credible and trustworthy your website and content are. Search engines give a lot of priority to this.
There are people who go and buy links from all sorts of sources, just to try to inflate this. It’s a bad idea. If Google thinks you’ve engaged in this practice, the penalties are severe; your website could disappear from search results for a very long time or, even, forever, if you don’t fix the problem.
To build links in a more natural way, the following will help:
- Produce top notch content that’s of real value and people will link to it.
- Form good relationships with people in your industry and share and link to their content if it’s valuable to your audience and possibly they will do the same if they find value in the content you’re putting out.
- Links from your peers or similar vertical industries carry the most weight.
- Use social media to increase the reach and velocity of your content.
41. Guest blogging to boost your website and author profile
Guest blogging is a great way to improve your writing skill, while boosting your website and authorship profile.
Find a website or blog that will publish your article and shares interests with what you’ve written. I’d also recommend investing in some domain-rank tracker so you can see which outlets are the most credible to work with. Although for those still struggling to get off the ground, this step isn’t crucial.
Keep in mind that they are a way of establishing a relationship between your outlet and another. So, don’t just think about what they can do for you. In your pitch to the editors of the site, state why your article is a good fit for them and how it fits alongside the others they have on their site. Adhere to the tone, style, themes and/or guestposting guidelines you see on the website. And of course, do this without sacrificing your own unique writing style.
While it’s customary to expect a backlink and an author profile/bio, be sure not to exploit the relationship by using their platform as an opportunity to sell to their audience. Including too many links to your page, or employing an overly salesy tone is bound to make the editors and the audience skeptical of your brand.” says Caio Bersot, digital content specialist fromEnergyRates.ca, a price comparison website that helps consumers find low-cost rates for electricity and gas.
Caio Bersot | Energy Rates
Caio Bersot is the senior digital content specialist at EnergyRates.ca, a leading energy rate comparison website. Energy Rates provides users with unbiased third-party reviews of electricity and natural gas retailers so they can select the best option for themselves.
42. Optimize for your audience first.
Many beginners make the mistake of stuffing their website with keywords they’re looking to rank for. Unfortunately, search engines flag this as spammy material that’s difficult to read. Optimize for your audience first, then focus on search engine crawlers. Making sure your content is clear, concise, and useful is crucial for successful SEO.
43. Don’t compete against yourself.
While it’s tempting to optimize every page on your website for one important, high-volume keyword, you have to mix it up. Target different keywords on each page so that you’re not fighting against yourself for prime SERP real estate.
44. Check your page load speed.
Page load speed is one of the most important factors for successful SEO. Google will dock your rankings if your page is taking over three seconds to appear to users. Easily speed up your load time by changing to a faster server and exporting all image files as web-ready JPGs.
Charlie Tatum | Online Optimism
Charlie Tatum is a content strategist at Online Optimism, a leading full-service digital marketing agency in New Orleans, Louisiana.
45. Use the Fly Wheel method to gain back links
Focus on building tools, applications and programs that will allow you to gain back links due to your innovation. This is called the Flywheel method first coined by Moz founder Rand Fishkin. This has helped me rank websites even in the toughest of industries.
Jonathan Alonso
Jonathan Alonso is a Digital Marketing Consultant that turns question marks into exclamation points. Jonathan believes in creating an experience that sells your brand and brings new customers to fall in love with your product.
46. Check Your Website Dailyu00a0
The best tip to give an SEO beginner would be to write meaningful content and to optimize often. Your headers should be of value to your clients/users.
Your goal is to rank on page one of Google. To succeed, you must give the user what they are looking for at the beginning of your article on your blog/website.
If you touch your website daily and update and add keywords, over a short period of time, you will rank #1.
Lisamarie Monaco | National Independent Life Insurance Agent
I am a mom of 5 kids, an entrepreneur, and I love to help people.
*Everything I do, I do with Passion.*
47. Partner with your Public Relations team to put together data-driven research studies and hosting them on your website
One of the most valuable assets in an SEO expert’s efforts to earn high-quality backlinks to their website is their Public Relations team. The goals between organic search (SEO) and public relations are quite similar in that organic search aims to drive authority for its website, while PR strives to build positive brand awareness. PR works to get mentions in the press, blogs, social media, etc. while organic search seeks backlinks from high-quality external websites.
An SEO expert typically does not have existing relationships with the media, influencers or bloggers. It is difficult to develop new contacts, especially when your goal is to build links for your website. But your PR team can help solve this problem since they’ve already built connections with several journalists and media outlets.
That’s why my favorite link building strategy is to partner with our Public Relations team in putting together data-driven research studies and hosting them on our website. Data-driven stories that tackle an industry study or internal research that we conducted make for interesting pieces of content for our customers but can also be quite newsworthy. Pitching stories like these to journalists is the perfect way to earn links from top tier media outlets.
Michelle Levine | Vistaprint
Michelle Levine is a Manager on the Organic Search team at Vistaprint. Michelle is passionate about digital marketing and has been working in the digital marketing, project management and client services industry for over 10 years.
48. Produce comprehensive and authoritative content that offers a unique resource for an in-demand topic
Google prioritizes authority and relevance u2014 meaning that you need to create better content in 2020 that showcases expertise. You will see that better content more easily demands social shares and back links. You make your content better, relevant, and authoritative by finding the pain point for your target audience through technical SEO, but then deliver a unique resource that’s aimed towards helping actual people.
For example, this past quarter, instead of producing more content, I decided to focus on making one piece of content an amazing resource for a target audience, then promoted the heck out of it.
First, I did keyword research to find the right topic (high search volume, low difficulty), then looked at similar content to see what other people were doing and if there was a niche that could be filled.
I created 1 expert article, quoting 6 doctors/orthodontists as well as a comprehensive survey regarding braces that helps people better understand which type of braces are right for them. It took a while, but as I approached dentist and orthodontist with my finished expert article/survey, I wasn’t begging for a backlink, they were begging to have my survey embedded on their site and to be shared by their followers because it was very helpful to those target audiences. My intensive research led to a resource that demanded trust, even by medical professionals.
So what is the takeaway? Produce comprehensive and authoritative content that offers a unique resource for an in-demand topic. Content that involves case studies, primary research, infographics, surveys, expert quotes, etc. helps give you authority that keeps readers reading and media outlets linking. This kind of content gets responses from cold pitches and backlinks from media outlets. Less, but better content should result in more backlinks for you 2020 gameplan.
Madison Smith | Best Company
Madison Smith: SEO and Content Marketing Strategist for Bestcompany.com. She focuses her energy on content in the health and lifestyle space. In her free time she loves listening to podcasts and audiobooks when she takes her dog for long walks.
49. Focus on niche keywords first
When you are starting SEO you need to make a good keyword list. Free tools like Google keyword planner or Ubersuggest can help you with that. Ranking for the most searched keywords is tough so people are more and more looking to rank for niche or long tail keywords.
Those are keywords that are specific and contain 3 or more words. Check webmaster tools for these long tail keywords and creat content based on them.
Filip Silobod | SEO at Honest Marketing, Ireland
Filip is an experienced SEO professional and founder of Honest Marketing, a small digital marketing service in Galway, Ireland.
50. Create An Impactful SEO Strategy and Build Relationships
Many are quick to offer simple tricks to improve SEO. From experience, I know the benefits accrued from quick-and-easy SEO solutions are limited.
Most impactful SEO initiatives take time and specific talent. Learned from my past marketing initiatives, one impactful SEO strategy that even beginner SEO specialists can master is publishing thought-leadership articles in prominent industry or trade magazines that then backlink to your site.
Getting your foot in the door requires that you develop a relationship with the magazine editor. Sending a cold email will often fall flat; a better strategy is to meet editors face-to-face at industry trade shows where you can pitch your ideas and establish a trusting relationship.
High chances for success with this method requires that you possess snappy writing skills and advanced knowledge of a niche topic unrelated to the industry magazine but is being hyped in the industry nonetheless. In my case, I worked for an agriculture technology company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI).
There is so much hype about the technology in farming, yet there are few people able to explain AI and big data to the farming community. While at agrifood trade shows, I would visit every media company and offer to write non-promotional articles that explain the basics of AI technology to farmers.
Being educational rather than promotional, several editors agreed to publish my work without charge–another benefit of this method.
Dr Jason Behrmann | AI Marketing Montreal
Dr Jason Behrmann is the Director of Marketing and Communications at the AI software company, Zetane (https://zetane.com), and the president and co-founder of the professional group, AI Marketing Montreal.
51. Do Your Research
Every website has a Domain Authority (DA), which is generally an indicator of the relevance of the website for its subject area.
The higher the DA, the better placed your website is. When you write a post on your website, contact other websites who have written content on similar topic as yours, and have the same DA range as your website. Ask them for ‘mutual collaboration wherein you give a backlink to each other’ by placing a reference in each other’s content post.
This will seem like natural link building effort to Google and also benefit you both. Also, it is easier to convert similar DA websites, than the websites with a large DA.
When you do a guest post, *try to get a backlink in the main content rather than in the footer*. The link in the main content is considered more useful by Google and given a higher weightage.
Also try to guest post on websites which have content on similar topics as your own website to establish a relevance for the incoming link(s).
When you request for a guest post, always do a research of the target website, and suggest some potential interesting topics to them. Make it easier for them so that they are more keen to accept you, and thus provide a quality backlink.
Saurabh Jindal | Founder | Talk Travel
Talk Travel is a voice mobile application that enables travellers to speak, in their own preferred language, to destination experts and quickly find answers to their travel related queries.
52. Rank In Search Engines
SEO is of utmost importance when it comes to online presence because u201cthe majority of online traffic is driven by search enginesu201d, according to moz.com. Source
Because of this, knowing how to ace your SEO game is a must. Rank easily in search engines by following these effective tips:
- Use only the best keywords. Probably the most important thing you should pay attention to, keywords are phrases that you want your website to respond to. Look for the right keywords to trigger your post and use it all over your writing. My favorite tool for this is Google Keyword Planner. Coupled with Adwords, this free tool is easy to use, and more importantly, reliable.
- Link internal sites. Search engines u2018decide’ which posts to show first based on the number of backlinks it has because it is a direct measure of reliability. Both internal and external links are given great significance on this. Due to this, make sure you link your old posts to your new posts and if possible, update your old post to include links to your new ones. The best thing about this is you’re working with yourself, so it’s free and you’re the boss.
- Earn external links. Like internal links, external links are a measure of reliability too. However, external links are of much greater caliber because these are not always easy to obtain. Unlike internal links which you only do by yourself, external links are only earned when other websites actually trust your content.
53. Leverage Video
Video content is on the rise. Youtube and other social media platforms that consist of video content are more easy to be attractive because a 1 mint video has more appeal than a 1000 word blog post.
Creating quality content has been the biggest achievement in 2019 and it will be more appreciated in 2020.
54. Keyword Variations
What’s helped us rank content quickly is tailoring material around specific keyword searches.
For example, SAT prep is one of our core products, so finding key phrase search variations around it like SAT prep courses, best SAT prep courses, SAT prep best practices, SAT prep tips, etc.. Not only are they all related to the core keyword SAT prep, but they also provide room for differences between articles.
Also, they’re a great way to tailor your SEO titles to both register high for rankings and be intriguing enough for potential readers to click on.
55. Social Media Marketing
Take advantage of Social Media Marketing. No doubt, social media decreases the distance among peoples and helps the businesses to reach the potential customers only in one click. Topmost platforms are Facebook,Instagram and Pinterest.
Through the paid ads feature of Facebook, we make new customers every day, and it really helps us a lot. Facebook helps our customers to ask any query about products directly and give feedback.
My tip is to post continuously either on FB, Insta, or Pinterest to keep your audience engage and try to respond to them quickly if they have any queries. It will make a solid bond between customers and the brand. In short, you will create brand awareness, boost traffic, and improve SEO.u00a0
56. Learn Basic SEO and Use It Properly
To apply SEO properly you need to learn these things properly. Start from on-page SEO, by gathering keywords from any SEO tool. After that use those Keywords in an efficient way not stuff them into your content.
Adjust your keyword in URL, Headings, and in your content to come in search engine organically but be patient because it may take some time.
Try to write a shareable content, like hot topics and lengthy articles but not novels because search engine prefers longer content over shorter content.
Linkbacks are also a great factor for improving page ranks so outreach daily to get backlinks from your niche sites.
Noman Asghar | Film Jackets
Noman is a Content Writer with expertise in Digital Marketing and SEO.
2 Responses
Wow thank you so much. I’ve been blogging for years but haven’t quite gotten the hang of SEO. I realize now I was using my headers wrong >.< Going to fix that now. Keeping these tips open for sure.
Thank you so much for featuring my tip on Link Building. This is a great resource for those who want to get started on SEO. Well done, congratulations!
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