Want to succeed at
SEO?
Good practices start with avoiding bad habits of the past. Eliminate
ineffective practices and replace them with strategic, content-focused
tactics. Here are seven great ways to do that:
Related: How to Create a Site Structure That Will Enhance SEO
1. Approach keywords strategically
Without proper keyword research, any SEO campaign is doomed to
failure. Keyword research sets the stage and lays the groundwork for an
SEO campaign.
Take a vague keyword phrase like “dog food.” This might be used by
people seeking information on dog food or news about it (such as
recalls). But a specific keyword phrase such as “buy raw dog food” is
more likely to be selected by someone who’s ready to buy a specific type
of canine chow.
Keyword phrases should be as specific to your company as possible and
have an easy, conversational sound not a marketing vibe. Just consider
how you search for things online.
Perhaps more important than selecting specific phrasing, however, is
not becoming paralyzed or slowed down by the temptation to achieve
perfection in keyword optimization for every text-based piece of content
you publish.
While keywords form the basis of an effective understanding of -- and
competition for -- a target market, trying for a #1 search-engine
ranking (or even for a top 10 spot) for your business niche’s top
keyword is usually extremely difficult when you're starting an SEO
campaign in a field with competitors who have doing this for a while.
Instead, take
a long-tail approach to keywords. Consistently publish as much amazing content as you can, which naturally will include keywords, and you’ll capture
long-tail
search traffic. This type of traffic tends to come from keywords you
would probably never find during the research phase and that are often
more targeted, resulting in better conversion rates.
2. Strictly adhere to an originality rule.
When it comes to SEO, originality refers to duplicate content or the
same text existing at two different URLs -- something that you should
always avoid. Republishing articles from other sites is not only a
potential copyright infringement, but it also creates duplicate content,
which can ruin your site’s search rankings.
Check to see if your site has duplicate content by using tools like
CopyScape,
SiteLiner and
Screaming Frog. Find more details about how to identify and remove duplicate content in this
article I wrote.
3. Strategically adjust your site’s navigation and internal links.
The way your site’s navigation is structured plays a major role in
how search engines determine the importance of each page. Simply put,
the more often a page is linked to within your website, the more
PageRank flow it has and the higher it will rank in search-engine
results pages for relevant queries.
Most webmasters and business owners, however, have no idea how their
internal link flow is structured and are often surprised to learn that
unimportant pages or ones that never stand a chance rank high in
search-engines results (like contact pages) are cannibalizing the
majority of their site’s PageRank flow. This offers major opportunities
for improvement with relatively minor effort.
To optimize your site’s navigation, internal link structure and
PageRank flow, start by auditing these elements using a tool like
SiteLiner or Screaming Frog. Use the output to identify pages
that aren’t important or that have little content on them (such as
contact pages) that receive a high volume of inbound links. Next, use
special
noindex code in these pages to tell search engines to not index these pages and add
nofollow code
for all links to them, in order to preserve PageRank flow. This causes
an effect similar to shutting off a leaky water valve: It redirects
PageRank flow to the pages that truly matter.
Be sure to noindex all pages that have duplicate content, such as
category and tag archives, which are common in the Wordpress
content-management tool. You can use various Wordpress plugins, such as
Yoast SEO, to
accomplish this easily. Be careful with these steps, though. Improperly
using the noindex and nofollow attributes can severely decrease your
site’s rankings if you aren’t careful and strategic. Let an expert do
this if you aren’t absolutely certain about what you’re doing.
Related; This Google Feature Can Improve Your SEO
4. Optimize on-site elements across your site
While title tags are still important for SEO purposes, meta
descriptions have lost their influence in the ranking algorithm. Meta
descriptions do, however, provide a perfect place to put some marketing
talent to use, through the creation compelling copy that attracts clicks
from the search-results page.
Title tags and meta descriptions should be present on each page of
your site and should be relevant and optimized. Too short or too long
titles and descriptions can harm SEO efforts, so it’s best to
conduct an audit of your site to identify any large-scale issues with these elements.
Other on-page elements that factor into the ranking algorithm include
H1 tags, content length, internal and external links, ads, bullet
points, images and text formatting.
5. Optimize your site’s load speed
A site's load speed is a factor in search-engine rankings and it also
affects the rates of converting visitors to customers. Amazon
calculated that a one-second increase in page-load speed
would cost a company $1.6 billion in lost sales per year. Other studies have shown
40 percent of website visitors abandon a site
that takes longer than three seconds to load. Still, most business
owners or webmasters fail to put enough effort into optimizing their
site’s load speed.
Start by checking your site's load time by using a tool like
Pingdom,
which will give you a breakdown of each element and how long it took to
load. Use the resulting information to optimize images or pieces of
code that are causing long load times. Upgrading your web host from a
shared server to a dedicated or virtual private network (VPN)
setup can significantly reduce load times, too.
6. Don’t buy links. Earn them.
Because the quantity and quality of inbound links have a significant
impact on a website's rankings, the temptation to buy links on other
sites is strong. But link buying and selling are against
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Additionally, search engines are now very good at detecting
suspicious, manipulative or unnatural links. The result? If you buy or
sell links, your website’s search-engine rankings could fall
significantly. Save your money and instead spend it on creating content
that will earn or attract inbound links on its own merit. For specific
examples about how to create and publish content that earns inbound
links naturally, see my ebook
The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online.
7. Be natural
If you feel like you have to wedge a keyword into a sentence, you’re
approaching SEO with the wrong mind-set. Whereas keyword density was a
popular concept five years ago, it’s irrelevant now. Instead, focus on
creating content that your readers will find valuable.
If a sentence sounds unnatural because you’re trying to optimize it
for search engines, change it. Search engines are cracking down harder
than ever before on keyword stuffing, so such tactics are likely to
cause your rankings to fall and annoy anyone who tries to read your
content, killing your credibility.
You don’t have to spend money on an SEO expert to dramatically
improve your search visibility. Simple steps can achieve major SEO
boosts. In the end, SEO is all about improving the usability and user
experience of your website. Any change that makes your visitors happier
is likely to make search engines happier. So SEO is really about making
people happy and that should make us all happy.
source :
http://www.entrepreneur.com 
