12 SEO Tips to Grow your Site
If you want to optimize your entire website for search engines, you need to follow these basic tips:
1. Focus on One Thing
Your website can be about other stuff, too, but you should choose a primary topic that’s most essential to your message. It is a very important step, so you should consider doing a bit of keyword research before you choose a topic.
2. Insert Keywords in the Right Places Only
The “one thing” should be included in your website title, description, domain name, blog categories, keywords, tagline, page content, and page titles. If you are using WordPress, you can change many of these in the General Settings or using a plugin such as All in One SEO Pack.
3. Link to Internal Pages on Your Website
You can use most content management systems for this since they actually do it automatically, but if yours doesn’t, you need to be intentional when it comes to linking directly to your most important pages from your homepage and cross-linking them with each other.
4. Use Keywords in Your Permalink Structure
Websites sometimes have an “ugly” permalink structure that identifies pages using numbers. Avoid doing this because it is bad for SEO and simply does not look good. Instead, use a URL structure that includes text and ensure that you include keywords in your URLs.
So, rather than having a page’s URL that’s like this:
https://www.yourwebsite.com/?p+11
It should look more like this:
https://www.yourwebsite.com/amazingpage
5. Eliminate Anything Slowing Down Your Website
Page load times matter, so remove any non-essentials bogging down your website, which may include large images, music players, and unnecessary plugins.
6. Use Keywords in Your Images
Use words that reflect your website topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes. You should also use alternative titles for file names that don’t reflect your main keywords (e.g. seo-tips.jpg rather than d234.jpg).
7. Link to Other Websites That Have Relevant Content
You can do this by including a link list, blogroll, or resources page on your website. Obviously, this should be done sparingly, because each outbound link is essentially a “vote” for another website. If you do it well, however, and people click your links, this informs search engines that you’re a trusted authority on your specific topic.
8. Update the Website Regularly
Websites with dynamic content usually rank higher than those websites with static content. It is the reason why blogs and directories such as Wikipedia do so well on search engines. They are regularly updated with fresh content.
9. Ensure the Website is Indexed in Search Engines
Most search engines will find your content automatically and index it, but this is not something you should count on. You want to ensure that search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Google are crawling your website, so that people can find you online. If they aren’t, you can add them directly.
10. Have Other Websites Linking to Yours
It is really important, especially when it comes to SEO software. The only unfortunate reality is that it isn’t something that’s necessarily under your control. Besides creating great content, the only thing you can do is ask, which can work sometimes.
The best advice here would be to spend the time you would use trying to convince somebody to link to you writing great content. A great place to start is guest posts on other blogs. Always remember that inbound links are essential to SEO.
11. Don’t Change Your Domain Name
The age of your URL is a factor in the search ranking of your website, so be patient. If you launch a new blog every 6 months, you will never get to see your website get the value it deserves.
12. Write Like a Human
None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like it was written by a robot. Write amazing content, follow the steps above, be patient, and you will definitely see results. For more guidance to get your website noticed speak to the experts at Summon.
You may have already started blogging, but many of the tips discussed here can be applied retroactively. Once you have done this, you can start writing content regularly.
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