With the advent of social media, SEO isn’t the be-all, end-all it once was. These days, you can in fact build a social following and plug links to your site on other online and offline media without being an SEO guru.
However, you also don’t need to be a guru to get your business websites ranking well either. And why wouldn’t you want to rake in countless visitors just by tweaking a few simple things in your SEO content strategy?
SEO is important for businesses, but it needn’t be complicated to be effective. Below, you’ll find 7 SEO content tweaks that even a monkey can do. That is, if you know how to train a monkey to use your computer and content management system!
1. Never post content strictly for ranking purposes
This easy tweak comes first for a reason. Basically, the majority of visitors to your website can tell when you’ve uploaded the content just to try to rank for certain keywords and phrases. Much in the same way that most of us know when we’re looking at a landing page intended to sell a product rather than content offered to inform or entertain.
Don’t put up content unless you can offer true value – ie., to entertain or inform in as expert a fashion as possible!
2. Page header (ie., H1 tag)
The H1 tag is the title of each post. It’s the first thing that a search engine user will see in the results. It should be as short as you can make it while still indicating what the content is about. The H1 tag also needs to attract attention and tell potential visitors what they can expect from the content.
Good H1 examples include:
“Organic bug repellent recipes”
“How to style your hair like Kylie Jenner”
“Tips for planning your next backyard cookout”
Get the title wrong and your content won’t rank, and even if it does, few are likely to click on it.
3. Focus on smart keyword usage
Many new webmasters and content creators still think they have to cram a bunch of keywords into an article a hundred times to rank an article. Keyword stuffing has been a thing of the past for years now, just use them naturally. Include keywords in the title once, and the article body a few times – unless you can add it in more without making it look silly and unnatural.
For instance, a keyword like “Concrete Anchors” can be used naturally throughout an article describing how to choose and/or use them. A long-tail and rather rare keyword like “Buy Concrete Anchors in Albuquerque New Mexico” just won’t look right when it’s repeated more than two or three times in a long article. Worse, it’ll quickly turn off the reader.
Read your finished articles out loud and ask friends, family, and colleagues for feedback before putting any keyword-driven article up on your site, or before submitting it to another blogger for a guest post.
4. Interweave all webpage content
This one is simple. Try to link to at least one related, even loosely related, article in every post you do. This won’t immediately lead to improved SEO rankings, but it will improve your onpage ranking factors and increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site – all of which will improve rankings down the line, and get more people linking out to your content.
5. Hone your meta game
The meta description works hand-in-hand with your H1 title to reel in search engine visitors. It’s the brief description that appears below the title in the search engines. If you don’t manually input a meta description, your CMS will usually default to using a snippet from the opening sentence of your post, which isn’t necessarily ideal.
A good meta tells the search engine user what to expect from the post. It will also contain the main keyword you want to rank for and end with a call to action such as “click to learn more” or “continue reading”, or something along those lines.
6. Alt tags With Keywords on all images and videos
Alt tags are important and are among the easiest things you can do for SEO benefits. Put your keyword into alt tags, along with a brief description of the content.
Using the “Concrete Anchors” keyword example from before, a sample Alt tag for a picture of a concrete anchor in use on a concrete wall to hang shelving might be “Concrete anchors help ensure your shelves never fall down.”
7. Guest post for links
Guest posting on other blogs, either related to your industry or not, is one of the best ways to build organic links to your content. It’s important to be somewhat selective and look for blogs that rank really well (ie., have a high PR).
However, beggars can’t be choosers and you should really work on honing a great blog outreach strategy to get the most and best opportunities you can. You’ll find the quality of the opportunities you get directly relate to the quality of the posts you can offer.
The more expertise you can show in both your niche and the quality of your writing will allow you to consistently get better linking opportunities on authority blogs in your niche.
There you have it. Really simple SEO content tips that any business owner can use to get their websites ranking better. You’ll still need to hire the experts to make sure your site and code are structured for optimal SEO, but the 7 factors mentioned are definitely essential for improving your business’s search engine rankings.