7 Easy SEO Tips for More Search Engine Traffic

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by Brian Dean

Whether you run your own student blog – or plan on entering the digital marketing world after graduation – search engine optimization (SEO) is a fundamental 21st century business skill.

Although SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, you don’t need to keep up with the cutting-edge changes in Google’s algorithm to get more search engine traffic to your site.

Here are 7 timeless tips that you can apply to your site – or your future employer’s site – right away.

Create Keyword-Rich Title Tags

Google uses the title tag of a page to determine what that page is all about:

That’s why it’s crucial to include a keyword-rich description in all of your page’s title tags. For example, if you were writing a blog post about social media, you want to put the keyword “Social Media Marketing” somewhere in your title tag.

In fact, an industry study by SEOMoz found that pages with keyword-rich titles tended to perform better in search compared to pages without keywords.

Put Social Sharing Buttons Prominently on Each Page

There are some readers that will gladly share anything you publish. But there’s a certain percentage of your readers who need to see social sharing buttons to “remind” them to share your content.

I recommend adding social sharing buttons to the top and bottom of every post, similar to the Graziadio Voice:

Make Your Website Load Quickly

Google and other search engines consider a site’s loading speed as a ranking factor. In general, slow loading sites tend to fare poorly in their search results. You can test your site’s speed using this tool.

One of the easiest ways to improve your site speed is to use a customizable CMS, like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. All of these programs have plugins and addons you can use to speed up your site without having to touch a single line of code.

Write Great Content

Search engines want to place the web’s best content in front of their readers. Every time you hit the “publish” button make sure you’re publishing something great. When you do this people will naturally link to and share your content on social media: both of which are important for SEO.

Build Backlinks…Carefully

One of the most important ranking signals search engines use to rank pages the amount of links pointing to them. Sites that resort to link schemes to manipulate this ranking signal likely to get penalized by a penalty, like the infamous Penguin update that Google rolled out in April 2012.

That’s why I recommend sticking to ethical, white hat link building. When you do that you know that backlinks you’re pointing to your website are going to help your pages rank for the long haul.

This includes niche-relevant directory submissions, guest posting and links on social media websites, likeTwitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Build a Brand Online

Many people in the SEO field think that search engines now pay attention to so-called “brand signals”. This may be a way for search engines to filter out potentially low-quality content.

Some important brand signals to pay attention to include a large social media following, creating content that people love to share (infographics, guides etc.) and promoting your site on forums and social media websites.

Don’t Be Shy

Remember: there are thousands of pages vying for Google’s top 10 results. It’s a competitive place. While great content can help you reach the top, it’s usually not enough.

To get the search visibility your site needs you must actively promote it. This can be anything from advertising online to emailing webmasters asking them to share your best content. It sounds simply, but it’s something very few webmasters do on a consistent basis. There’s a huge opportunity for site owners that get out of their comfort zone and become their site’s cheerleader.

Soutce: https://bschool.pepperdine.edu