Quick question for you – how's your SEO doing?
Are you happy with your results, or is that something you're still trying to conquer?
If the latter is true, you're definitely in good company. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of making a website more friendly and rank higher for search engines (without alienating human readers in the process). It can be a tricky item to master, especially when you're just starting out as a blogger or website builder. And just when you think you've got it pinned down, the most often used search engine, Google, releases a change to their algorithm making everyone with a website panic and wonder how it will affect their ratings.
There are a ton of SEO tips out there for sure. And some of them are fantastic. Others are, well, created by people who would like to think of themselves as experts <grin>.
In all honesty, though, much of what makes up good practices for SEO just isn't that hard. It's not something magical, and it's not something reserved for a select geeky few. I'm here to walk you through 7 tips for improving your SEO that you can start putting in place today.
Want to know how to boost your ranking on Google?
7 SEO Tips to Boost Your Ranking
Choosing Keywords
Just like any blogger, when I start a new post, I start with a subject or theme that I'd like to cover for that day. Maybe I find something in the news that catches my interest, or there's a trending topic on Twitter that catches my eye, or a change to Facebook that needs some attention to make the information understandable and useful.
But once I have a topic identified, I don’t just go at it. Using the Google keyword tool, I take some time to do some research to identify keywords that are relevant to the subject at hand. And lest you flash back to some in depth research for school, let me assure you this kind is easy: you simply use the Google keyword tool, enter words or questions related to the theme you're considering, and examine which ones are frequently searched by people on Google, using what keywords.
When you do this, you'll get a table back with a bunch of related entries, and you might throw up your hands in despair. Don't. Simply click the competition to organize the entries and make it easier to find what you want, particularly if you're new to performing SEO research for your blog: A keyword phrase with high traffic and low competition.
Content Matters
This is perhaps the most important of the seven tips: content matters. No matter how great your ranking is, the most important tip you can use to improve your search engine ranking results is to provide content that is rich in information, engaging, and moves your readers to take action.
Quality of content matters, and it matters a lot.
But so does quantity. You'll also want to make sure that you aren't taking months to churn out one perfect post. The more often you create quality content, the more often the search engine spiders will crawl (visit each page) on your site.
Some people say content is king, and this is one of the top reasons that creating quality content regularly is the single best tip for improving your search ranking.
Want Engagement? Engage with Other Blogs
Reading other blogs in your niche is a great way to keep your mind fresh and give you new information and ideas (to produce more of that great content you're writing regularly, see above).
Commenting on other blogs in your niche gives you an even better gift – links back to your blog. Links pointing in to your blog (aka inbound links) increase your relevance to the search engine crawlers I mentioned earlier. What do you get? An increased ranking is what you get. If you've picked sites to read that are closely related to your content, the links back have increased value to your own rankings. (I've always heard it was better to give than receive!)
Sitemap – The Map to Better Search Rankings
Do you know what a sitemap what a sitemap is? If not, that's okay. But having one is an easy way to boost your search engine ranking.
Creating one is easy. Assuming you're on WordPress (you are on WP, right?) there's a plugin you can grab here that does all of the work for you.
To give you the nitty gritty details: You need a sitemap. You want both an XML and an HTML sitemap. For an example of an HTML sitemap, click this link and visit my site's sitemap. http://assistsocialmedia.com/sitemap. And just a side note – having a sitemap makes it easier for those new visitors you've snagged via your SEO efforts to go back and read your prior posts, too.
Social Media
More than ever, social media sharing is playing an increasing role in determining how pages rank on Google. Why? Quite simply, the role of a search engine is to bring you to relevant, useful content. One of the ways to measure relevance and usefulness is to see what people are sharing on social sites most frequently.
When you create content, take the time to link to it from multiple social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the big one – Google+ (Google seems to have a preference for content provided by authors with Google+ profiles).
Speed Matters
One of the things that you might not have considered in optimizing your site to be found by search engines is the loading speed of your website. Regularly check your website's loading time, and make sure that any photos have been optimized for the web.
You'll especially want to double check your website after loading any plugins, as plugins can dramatically change your website's loading time. If you suspect that one of your plugins might be affecting your site's loading time, you can check this by disabling all of your plugins, and then enabling them one at a time to see which one is the culprit.
Be Consistent
When it comes down to it, all of these strategies for optimizing your site for better search engine rank consistency is huge. SEO isn't a destination, it's a journey, and it's one that can quickly go the wrong direction if you aren't consistent with your efforts. All the SEO strategies and tactics in the world won't do you a bit of good if you're doing them in fits and starts instead of a little bit every day. It's like exercise – you can't make up for a lifetime of bad habits the first time you work out. You can't start a website, try a few "magic" tricks and expect to be the #1 result on Google.
Remember the old fable about the tortoise and the hare? The tortoise won and the moral of the story applies here too: slow and steady wins the race every time, SEO included!
Let us know what you think we would love to hear from you. What are your favorite SEO tips? Any other easy tips that you can add to this list? Leave us a comment below.
About The Author:
This article was contributed by one of my Social Media Apprentices at www.assistsocialmedia.com. Elizabeth Maness is the owner and CEO of Assist Social Media, a marketing company dedicated to increasing your online presence through social media, SEO, blogging, and email marketing.
Thank you for sharing The article Kim! I can't say how much you mean to me in this little box. I've learned under your leadership than I gathered on my on in the almost 10 years I've been in business and I thought I was gather savvy .;-) ! I Can hardly wait for Social Boom to huge your neck and hear you speak in person again. Social media and SEO go hand in hand. What you have helped me do in such a short time is rather amazing! There will be a book
got the name in my head already!
Thanks for sharing, you have discussed many areas in a few words, great job, regarding to last Google updates, content still the king and will be, on another hand social media signals plays a main role to get high ranking and to increase the popularity.
I'm totally with you " Commenting On Blogs Like Your Own "
Elizabeth did such a great job; this makes it very clear what SEO really does and how we can get the best out of it. I always write the article and then do a keyword search; I know it is the other way around, but I have always been too stubborn to change that. NOW is the time for that change, thanks!!
Great article Elizabeth and Kim. Those steps are not very difficult. Come to think of it, I've been doing several of those for my own blog lately.
cheers!
Lovely article–super helpful! I learned tons and will be looking up the resources you mentioned. This is definitely an area I need a boost in!
Glad it was helpful, Elise!
Thanks for the great reminders Liz. I already use most of the tips but never thought of using the sitemap for comments.
Wow, never heard of a sitemap before. Good to know. Researching keywords before a post is another great idea! Thanks!
I have a sitemap on my site, but it's for Google purposes. I don't have one for readers. Great idea! Thanks!
Glad it was helpful
I never thought that a site map could help in boosting blog traffic. Thanks for sharing this great article Liz and Kim!
Take notes of all of your practice trades as well as the trades you pass on. When you find something that matches your plan and your criteria but you decide not to execute a trade, note why you didn't go with it so you can see if you made a wise choice down the road. Even though you didn't choose it, monitor this stock to see how it performs. As you continue practice trading you will likely see areas of your plan that you need to tweak. It's important to work the bugs out before you start investing with real money.
Great article and I didn't even know I had a site map in place. Thanks for making me dig around in my own site.
What a great post Liz! I'm doing pretty much all of these but never realized how much the affect SEO.
Wow, never heard of a sitemap before. Good to know. Researching keywords before a post is another great idea! Thanks!
Love the post Liz. Will be implementing the site map into my strategy!
I'm one who hadn't already done a site map, so I'll be implementing this today! Thanks as always for sharing your wisdom, Liz and Kim!
Great tip huh, Pauline?
You're welcome Pauline ..;) Thank for all the tips and great editing of this article for me..;) you are the boom!
Excellent article…I have a sitemap on my site but hadn't really paid much attention to it. All great tips and reminders!
i just came across your blog….. I really appreciate you for all the valuable information look forward to more articles
thanks for sharing this
Alex, glad the info is helping!
i have been trying all of these seo tips on my blog, getting a little exposure right now, blog is so new
Keep with it, Hassan! Your exposure will grow.
Solid article – totally agreed, consistency is the key! Ive slowly discovered that quick fixes to boost rankings are a myth, only through solid backlinks from reputable sites and original content can you be sure of gaining high serps and keeping them This is more important now than ever with google updates such as Penguin and Panda doing the rounds.
No replacement for consistency
Hello Kim I seen a tweet you recently made and that is how I found you(#wordpress), I suppose that would be indirectly aimed at your point regarding social media in this article.
Two Years ago I was completely clueless about websites and social media. Until I finally took the plunge and actually started applying myself.
Through the blogging world have found beneficial and helpful people such as yourself. Yes it took some time to figure out that page load speed and a sitemap are very important for any websites success. I look forward to reading more of your articles. I usually blossom in the winter time, for I also own a lawn care company in Minnesota.
Winter time is almost upon us so I bet you are going to be growing away in the following months
Hi,
Nice topic you have share Elizabet, this 6 tips is really good and help in traffic plus give keyword ranking and page rank to the blog. so my suggestion is follow the tips of Elizabeth because it is safe and white hat seo. keep it up and share more.
Thank
Kamran
Ensuring that title tags well represent your page (keyword) is also a great practise. This clearly tells the search engines what the page is about.
Thanks for the added tip.
Great information and easy to understand for beginners. I like the suggestion with the images and had really never thought about that. I always forget that their are keyword tools out there to make the job easier.
<a href="http://www.businessframe.com/">effective seo</a>
Glad it was helpful Jane!
Hi Kim,
Thanks so much for sharing. I really enjoyed the part that talked about site speed and WordPress plugin's.
I have read that many people try to limit the number of plugins that they use for exactly this reason, I try to 'hard wire' the code into my CSS or .php files wherever possible. Have to say it's not that easy though as a newbie to html and the like!
Best regards,
Glenn
Yes, hard coding can be a bear
Just wanted to say thank you. I am in the process of setting up my blog and trying to figure out how everything works. (Last night, as I struggled with my site, I was thinking that all the people who told me WordPress was easy were either liars or braggarts.
) You have no idea how grateful I am to have run across your site tonight. Great information. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speed is definitely an issue–I'm looking at moving my hosting over to Amazon so that I can increase my load time. As an Australian-based site, I definitely feel as though this is a problem for me.
I totally agree with you points of keyword research based on the theme of your site, using sitemap, checking page load speed these are very important on-page optimization techniques and we should do the perfectly to get better ranking in search engine.
The SEO tips are brilliant.All contents were expressed in a clear,simplified manner and it was meaningful too. You are a marvelous writer. Good work! I learned a lot in SEO and understand it better.
Glad they were helpful, Juliet!
Hi, I was curious that how can we improve the speed of our website. Is there a tool which offers some kind of analysis regarding the load time and some suggestions as well.
"…content matters. No matter how great your ranking is, the most important tip you can use to improve your search engine ranking results is to provide content that is rich in information, engaging, and moves your readers to take action." Agreed!
If you listen to Matt Cutts, he repeats this advice time and again. The truth is, no matter the "tricks" webmasters use, search engines can change the rules of the game. But what they always want is great content that provides visitors with value.
Absolutely!
SEO optimization is one of those things that has me a bit confounded! I use a WordPress.com free blogging site for my website so I believe that means I'm not entitled to use plugins for it, but if I stand to be corrected, please correct me. I'm not really sure how to change my website over to the WordPress.org version that allows plugins so that I can install a Simple Sitemap without losing all the content and design I've already put into my site. I've done everything on it by myself but I'm not a web designer so if I switch over I'm afraid that I won't be able to figure out how to use my site and the learning curve will take more time than I have at the moment. Without any proper SEO optimization, my site gets on average of 85-100 hits per day. Are there different strategies for SEO optimization for those of us who use WordPress.com's free blogging sites?
Thank you so much for your excellent articles & tips, Kim!
All my best,
Christine
Christine, you definitely need to switch to wordpress.org and start really getting serious traffic for your site.
Thanks for the tips, SEO is so important for a business to expand and grow. If you know what you are doing you can be unstoppable!
Yes you sure can!
Really content is king i learned a lot from you.This seo tips will help me to bring traffic as well as in top search engine thanks Dawbwilkson again.
Glad it has been helpful for you!
Personally I like 5 tips about Google top Ranking I think this tips very help full who have blogger , Please keep up it
Great set of tips and super useful still today.
Thanks Trevor!
Another great post. Rank is important but word of mouth is just as important.
Word of mouth is definitely amazing!
Actually keyword searching is the most important part of all the SEO
It is definitely important for sure.
Nowadays on page SEO is more important than off page seo. Because google is very restricted now for ranking a website. If a website have huge backlink but poor on page seo, on the other hand a website have few backlink but high on page seo structure and content. Second website will rank higher soon.
Thanks Kim! I'm a Recent Big Fan! Keep Up the good work!
John Bailer
Thanks John!
Hi Kim,
SEO is very important if you want to rank high in search engine results. But I find it very confusing with all the algorithm updates that come out. I feel that creating awesome content that people will link to is the best way to build natural backlinks to your blog.
Thanks for sharing these tips, they are very useful especially for beginners.
Have a great day.
~Philip
One of the best articles ever read on SEO and how it works, especially for newbies who don't understand the concept. Trending is important so I'm glad you mentioned Google Keywords because without them we'd be lost in a sea of article… Thanks Kim again for a great article!
Glad it was helpful, Jodi!
Hi there, thanks for sharing this tips to us. I just wanna ask if what tool would be best for keyword research?
There are many but I use Google’s keyword research tool the most.
We should bear in mind how we can connect with other blogger or audience. having a blog without any audience you will end up nothing.
True!
I really appreciate you for all the valuable information look forward to more articles
thanks for sharing this. I use a WordPress.com free blogging site for my website so I believe that means I'm not entitled to use plugins for it, but if I stand to be corrected, please correct me.
Highly encourage you to get your own domain and install WordPress on it if you are serious about building an online business.
Thanks for the awesome advice. I have been going back and forth on whether or not I was
going to get it or not. After reading your post I think I am going to pull the trigger with
the next little bit if income I have come my way. Thanks a lot!
You can do it!
I believe that consistentsy and Socail Media are the most important for 2013.
I agree that consistency is HUGE, Jeremy!
I found your article unique and helpful. Social media and consistency are important factors as you mention.
Thanks Jignesh!
Thank you, I’ve recently been searching for info approximately this subject for a while and yours is the greatest I have came upon till now. But, what in regards to the conclusion? Are you certain concerning the subject?
Great article and I didn't even know I had a site map in place. Thanks for making me dig around in my own site.
That’s awesome to hear!
this is nice to know. pls i need help with my site . http://www.wapjoint.com
Glad it was helpful, Justin!
Something that was completely ignored here was the addition of Microdata. This helps Google and users pull information from your pages and is becoming increasingly more important.
nice layout i love this website and i really wana have such as this…..like wisethis topic i really learnt from it…thanks to the admin
Glad it was helpful, Maryrose!
Hey Kim, I recently became a bit obsessed with the loading speed of one of my sites to get it to rank better. I found this handy site that loads your site and then in detail shows you how much time it takes for every part of page. You can check it out here. www.webpagetest.org The problem was with some images on my site that caused it to take over 5 seconds to load. I removed them and everything else that was not necessary but could not get it to load faster than 4 seconds. I tried using cloudflare which brought the load speed down to 2.5 seconds but noticed my hosting was still mostly to blame for my slow loading times. Anycase, just thought i'd share my experience on this and hopefully someone would find it helpful.
Really great article, some good/valid points. Especially with regards to Social Media, it is such a powerful tool that if done well, can really help boost authority to your website!
I think the most important tips for seo is to have quality content on website as if your website has good quality content then surely it will rank on top pages of search engine
I think that you have covered almost everything about 7 SEO Tips to Boost Ranking. Thanks… Kim
Thanks for droppin by Ogglu!
so good article, thanks, i can get a lot of traffic after i read your post
Great Article.This is great for a beginners like me.
Great tips Kim! Thanks so much for sharing them! I have to admit I often use Google Keyword tool to find topics when I'm dry. Why not write something people want to read right?
Exactly Tisha
very useful information. please contribute more. i am following your blog.
Install the alexa tool bar is also the effective way to shrinkage the alexa rank
On top of this, I think being consistent is the most important one. Without consistency, there's no way to keep your site floating.
Hi kkoi you mentioned load speed I recently have added a good deal of images and this has slowed my load speed down considerably. What is the best way to optimise the pictures so that they load quicker.
await reply thanks lee
Thanks for your tips Kim. The keyword and qualified content is very crusial in drive traffic
That's step by step to building a site. I think this tips are good for looking for visitor, Page Rank, and SERP. Thanks a lot.
Creating a blogging site, and updating fresh blogs on it on a daily basis, is a great way to invite target traffic to the website..Great list!
Thanks for the great article. Social media signals is going to be the new SEO imo. also having a G+ account for your local business will give you great boast in local search ranking
good article .. thanks for sharing
Be consistent is the only and strongest tip, I personally found essential as winning strategy in SEO.
If you can not be regular in whatever you do, you start loosing your positing on internet.
Consistency is huge for sure!
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
Hi there,
wow! I’ve been working for SEO but never had this kind of blog traffic. thank you for this informative blog you have, keep it up!
Glad the tips were helpful Stephanie!
I would definitely consider this on my report. As a business management student it is a good thing to know that how SEO greatly help in having different businesses found by potential clients when they search online.
I always like your blog post because you always comes with different ideas and information. I always shared your site post with my friends. Keep posting and i will follow you. Stock tips
Great to hear.
great article … thanks for sharing the tips..
good content does half work for ranking the site.
It plays a huge role for sure.
All along i thought SEO is something for geeks but you have brought it in from a different angle. Thanks a lot
Glad to hear this
Hi
I have come back to this post a few times now as a reference just to check that what I am doing is along the right track. I am always trying to tweak and update what I am doing and make sure it is search engine friendly.
So great advice lee