SEO Marketing Strategy: Tips for Success in 2018

SEO (search engine optimization) marketing is essential to the success of your marketing campaign and your business. And yet, it is often overlooked by entrepreneurs. For some, it seems like a huge technical task that is beyond their grasp. Other entrepreneurs focus their promoting on social networks.

However, SEO is what will bring visitors directly to your site. If you don’t feel comfortable doing technical tasks, this is an excellent task to outsource to your Virtual Assistant.

Don’t skip the ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags on images.

If you use WordPress, you can put text in the alt tag area that means something to search engines and viewers too. If you want to place higher in search results, and don’t we all, pay careful attention to include these tags. Google places a high value on alt texts to determine what is on the image but also to determine the topic of the surrounding text.

Did you know that servers are case sensitive?

For that reason, when you type out an URL that you want to be SEO friendly you should not capitalize any of the letters. To improve your chances to rank higher in search engines, your URL needs to contain keywords that explain the article and be easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Just as you focus on external linking, you should also focus on internal linking.

For example, under a blog post adding an “if you liked this you may like this” link below it may keep your readers on your site and read longer. The length of time your visitors stay on your site is referred to as ‘bounce rate’ and it is another area Google looks at to calculate your rank on search engines.

Keep your content up-to-date.

Add new content but also upgrade old content by ensuring it’s still relevant and all the links work. When the search engines crawl your site, they like finding new information and it determines how often they return. If they don’t consistently find new content, they will return less often.

Broken links annoy visitors on your site so they click off to find a site that works correctly. When this occurs search engines will assume that your website is not providing a good user experience to the visitors. This results in search engines assigning you a lower rank. Review your old content for broken links often and fix them asap.

When looking for keywords consider long-tail keywords for your blog posts.

A study by Wordstream found that 50% of search queries are four words or longer. When creating your keywords, think about what you would enter in the search engines to find your post. For example, for this post would you search ‘SEO’ or ‘SEO marketing tips’? Using more words narrows search results down to the most relevant results.

Guest Blogging for SEO

If you’re going to guest blog for SEO, choose blogs that are relevant to your site, have the same audience, rank higher than your site, and receive a lot of engagement. This is easy to find with a little research.

Why guest blog? By including backlinks to your site, one guest post equates to three or four links for your landing page. That’s more search engine food. By writing for more popular blogs, you increase your credibility because readers will associate you with the person they already trust. These are just a couple of ways guest blogging benefits you. For more in-depth information, here is a great article from SEMrush.

Headlines matter a great deal when it comes to SEO.

Create headlines that include keywords and aren’t tricky. Don’t stuff them with keywords! You may think this is a great way to attract the search engines but it will lose your readers. The days of sensational headlines are gone. The best headlines describe what the article is about with clear words that your visitors, as well as search engines, understand.

When you publish an infographic, also include a blog post about it that gives the same information in the text.

Since most infographics are an image file, the search engines can’t see them. So without the text included in the post, they will not help your search engine rank. By adding the same information in text format, it will be found and positively affect your rank.

Don’t make the mistake of ignoring SEO because it’s too technical or you don’t understand it. Doing this will negatively affect your marketing campaigns success. Either take the time to learn how to use SEO effectively or outsource it to a professional.