Search engines friendly websites. That is all the webmasters dream about day and night. You see so many easy “hacks” here and there, and this makes it difficult for you to pick the ones that will not hurt your website and reputation. Finding SEO hacks that work can be an incredibly challenging task.
Let us check out a few common SEO tricks from Sherman Square Marketing that can make your blog the talk of the year –
Generate a list of keywords
Most blogs and e-commerce sites go about it the other way round. When SEO is your priority, you can start with a keywords list and then start developing your content. Now, the keywords and phrases should always describe your business, products, and services. You cannot use random unrelated keywords only because they are trending or high volume.
Try Google Wonder Wheel and Google Instant, if you are already done and dusted with Google Keyword Planner and Google Suggest.
Here’s a nifty tip: always check the LSI keyword suggestions from Google every time you pick a new keyword.
Get a new SEO plugin
Do you already have an SEO plugin? Do you not enjoy enough attention? Well, then it is time for a new plugin to take charge. Start with a keyword centric plugin that will tell you how useful your selected keywords are and how well your content is written. Now, you can enjoy most of the plugins for WordPress free. Check out All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO plugin before you move on to something else. If you have a dedicated website designer, tell him to find an SEO plugin that can easily enhance your site performance.
Tag them, always
Are you into a habit of tagging your posts? Come on! If you do not tag your posts, how do you expect your search engines to find the posts if they have no preemption what they are about?
You may not know this yet, but tags turn out to be SEO friendly for all blogs and content. Now, it is up to you to use smart tools and find out which keyword-rich tags you can use before you publish your post.
PS: Do not forget to tweak your blog titles before you publish. Your post titles determine your site SEO and the blog rankings beyond your wildest imagination. Always pay attention to your keywords before you publish a blog post title. Tweaking them after publishing can mess with your URL, so always do a double-check before you actually release it for public viewing.
Social network sharing should be an option
You need to add social media sharing buttons to your post. Matt Cutts may say that Google does not count social media links are outbound links and that they do not affect your SERP rankings. However, we know better. Make it easier for your readers to share and see more of your content from social media platforms. A little publicity on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram never hurt anyone. If you have particularly image heavy posts, make sure to add a Pinterest sharing buttons to your posts.
In fact, most blogs posts report that social networking platforms and social media serve as their primary sources of traffic. The idea is to make yourself visible enough, so people become curious about the content you have to share. Many bloggers and marketers believe in sharing the same content more than once via social media. It can trigger rather strong reactions. While some marketers may cry “foul,” your target audience becomes more intrigued to check out what you are trying to promote so keenly.
Keep your internal linking game strong
Not all bloggers and webmasters know this hack. Internal links count just as much as outbound links when it comes to Google ranks. Also, internal linking is a wonderful way to direct traffic from one page to another on the same domain.
For example – if you have an article on “SEO hacks for 2017” where you talk about some ways to increase blog traffic, you can link this section (anchor text) to another post, say, “How to boost traffic to your blog posts.” It can go on and on, creating a web of connections and links that associate all related articles. If you are using Yoast SEO for WordPress, you must have already experienced the auto-internal linking mode of the premium version.
What’s your theme?
Not all themes were created equal and you must know that by now. Some of the WordPress themes are super-duper SEO friendly. They were born to be friendly with search engines algorithms and no matter how many updates Google rolls out, you cannot phase these themes.
Then there are others, which are stubborn and they need all kinds of extensions and code tweaks to remain SEO friendly. Just having a premium SEO theme does not mean your content will top the charts. You need to right kind of settings, plugins, and optimization of both security and SEO to start with publishing content.
How can you expect to compete with the new-age websites with a bloated theme that does not have compatible coding?A bloated theme affects your page load times, and that directly affects your SERP rankings. Google has listed page load times as one of the leading factors that directly govern the website rankings.
That is why you need to opt for smart themes. These themes are not bloated, the come with an extra pack of shortcodes and customization options. If you do not need certain features and frilly codes that are slowing your site down, you should be able to get rid of them. Well, maybe not you, but your website designer should be able to get rid of them with little to no effort at all.
Maintaining SEO for WordPress sites is not difficult at all. Google may consider over 200 factors while deciding the rank of a website, but WordPress has clear ways of encompassing all these factors into categories. You can take care of them all by either choosing the right theme and customizing manually or picking the correct plugins.
