To experienced SEO specialists, the following list will seem redundant as you are well versed in your SEO careers. For newcomers in the SEO world, the following list is imperative to start off in the right direction. Anyone in the SEO world knows that content is king, but the following SEO tactics are good to follow if you want to stay on the white hat track of SEO.
- Keyword Stuffing – Keywords are very important when it comes to SEO as it is what we use as foundation to each SEO campaign for clients. Keyword stuffing is one of the first things you learn not to do when entering SEO. One version of stuffing consists of throwing a bunch of keywords on your website and hiding them within the background of your webpage. Another version that is commonly overlooked is keyword stuffing within your content. Most people do not realize that they are even doing it but rather think they are filling their pages with good content. An example of this kind of keyword stuffing is: “Our car wash is the best car wash in the area of Boston, MA. We strive to be the only car wash you ever come to to get your car washed.”
- Anchor Text – Anchor text is the texts in content that are hyperlinked to go to another page on your website or somewhere else. Having these on your website is good, but you want to make sure you diversify these types of text. If you have all words that say “contact” lead a user to the contact page it could have a negative impact on your website in terms of SEO. Try to use long tailed links such as “call us today”, or use different words that lead to a page.
- Optimizing Images – Yes, images can be optimized. There are several ways to do this and it includes, having a good alt text to tell search engines what the images are. Other ways to do this is to reduce file size of the image as slow load times for websites is usually because an image is too large. Adding a caption also helps as captions are read 300 times more than body text.
- Back Links – Having back links to your website is a great way to boost your ranking with Google, however, you need to go about it the proper way to see the positive results you seek. Buying links from a link farm or having a million back links to random websites will not do this for you. You want to make sure that your website is linked with well known and trusted websites. Nothing that looks like spam or not trusted by Google. Having 10 back links from very well known, trusted, and high authoritative websites is better than 100 crappy links. Another thing to be mindful of, is to space out when you add back links to your website. If you do a few at a time then that will be better than doing 50 all at once.
- Engagement – Social media is great for all businesses to have, but make sure you do not lean to heavily on how many followers you have, as that does not really help. What helps is engagement and interaction with your audience. If you have a good reputation and have good engagement with your audience, they will be more inclined to share your posts which helps spread your brand. This will also drive traffic and increase quality back links, which will help your SEO rankings.