4 Important Things About SEO That People Overlook
Search engine optimization is the art of priming your content for search engines. If done correctly, SEO will help make things easy for search engines—these algorithms will know who to give your content to and how highly to rank it. The following will explore four critical elements of search engine optimization.
Keywords Are Still Golden For Search Engine Optimization
Anyone who spends five minutes looking up search engine optimization is going to come across the concept of keywords and long-tail keywords. Despite this, many people don’t go back through their content and include those ever-important keywords, nor do they spend their time researching what keywords are right for them. Foremost, the keywords need to reflect what you’re actually providing. Secondarily, you want keywords that have the greatest amount of searches for the smallest amount of results (this means the keywords are less competitive, that when someone searches this word or phrase or question, not very many things come up). It is almost always better to select keywords that have fewer searches and fewer results than the ones that have a ton of searches and a ton of results, especially if you’re just starting out.
A good strategy would be to include a wide range of keywords with different levels of competition. Have some easy wins (meaning, there’s no competition but very few searches), some incredibly popular searches and some in the middle. When you study your analytics, you’ll be able to see which levels of competition you’re doing well in and which ones you’re struggling to handle.
Headings Are Crucial For SEO
Headings are something that isn’t talked about nearly enough when it comes to SEO. These are the titles and subheadings you use to break up the text into written content (see above: Headings Are Crucial For SEO; that’s a heading). It is critical that you do not simply enlarge the font that you’re using when creating content to visually produce headings. You must mark the text as a heading in the program you’re using to post the content. Search engines value the words inside headings more heavily than they do words in the body of your text. If you don’t mark the words as heading words, you’re missing out on a massive potential boost to your search engine optimization.
Regular Auditing Is Essential
Just like every other element of your online presence, your search engine optimization efforts and outcomes need regular auditing. If you don’t know how to do this, Prosperity Media Enterprise SEO suggests hiring a company that specializes in SEO. It’s all too easy to overlook errors or areas that have room for improvement in your own work. Just like writers have their work proofread by someone else before they publish, you might want to have your SEO strategy and outcomes examined by a third party.
Be sure to be critically examining your results at least every three to four months, if not more often. Sit with your analytics and figure out what worked and what didn’t, and adjust accordingly. Algorithms are always being updated, which means your SEO tactics should always be being updated as well. Something that worked last week might not bring in the same results this week. Something that wasn’t helpful at all last month might be the missing ingredient in your SEO strategy.
As a part of these regular audits, you want to be reading up on the constant changes that are happening in the digital world. Read business articles about search engine optimization, take out books from the library, follow the major search engine’s press releases. All of this information can come together to help you keep up with the ebb and flow of the digital tide.
Connect Your Content To Other Content To Improve Domain Authority
A big part of making your work organically discovered involves connecting it (via links and mentions) to other online content that mirrors or works well with your content. Domain authority is a measurement system that search engines use to determine how useful and trustworthy each page of your content is. Several things influence domain authority, but backlinks are king. Backlinks are instances where other pages outside your website link to your pages. The higher the domain authority of a page that links to you is, the bigger the boost the backlink will have on your domain authority. You can figure out where you stand by using one of several free online tools that provide the domain authority score when given a URL link.
Given the importance of backlinks when it comes to improving domain authority, and therefore, search engine rankings, guest posting, guest blogging, or guest podcasting are crucial elements of a good SEO strategy. But this doesn’t just mean getting an article up on every blog you can; this means sharing valuable information with people in your crossover audience on sites that have high numbers of regular visitors with high domain authority.
Take your time and learn about the process of pitching articles to bigger outlets. Understand that editors of these larger, more popular online publications have a lot to do in their day. Make your pitch straight to the point by describing the format, title, sources, and elevator pitch. Be sure to mention why people will want to read your article (the hook) and make it easy for whoever is reading the email to find your contact information and writing samples. You can write a follow-up email if you don’t hear back, but this should be after at least a two-week wait. Be sure you also follow any specified guidelines by the publication, like their preferred length and the typical writing style they accept.
While none of these tactics are brand new per se, there’s a reason they’re continually important in SEO. You need to learn how to communicate with search engines, and the above tips can help you do that. Of course, if you don’t have the time or digital wherewithal to consistently be applying these steps and analyzing the outcome and readjusting and analyzing again, you might want to reach out to a professional SEO team.
