Top 20 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques You Must Learn

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO includes both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and raise awareness in search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your website is structured in a way that search engines understand.

Here is our list of 20 things you must do to ensure the health of your online visibility profile.

On-page Optimization  

1. Have good quality content. There is absolutely nothing that will help you more than having the content that your readers want. There is nothing more harmful than poor quality content.

2. Make sure every article has at least 500 words, preferably one thousand words or more.

3. Make sure that every article has other media like photos or video clips. This increases engagement.

4. Make sure everything is clearly marked with headings, paragraphs and the like.

5. Make sure that your sentences and paragraphs are short. People don’t have time to wade through dense pages.

Social Media

6. Never think you are above social media. Social media is marketing in its purest form. With social media you are right where the market is. Use that to your advantage.

7. Don’t just sell, sell, and sell on the social media sites. People hate that. They aren’t on social media to buy, buy, and buy. They are there to socialize.

8. Use social media as a testing ground. Get your customers ideas, opinions and reviews.

9. Use social media sites to update the customers on your business – where it’s going, who you are as a team, etc. 

10. Don’t stick to one social media site. Spread your efforts across all of them.

SEO Link Building

11. Link building should be a part of your arsenal. Even in 2016. That’s not to say you can do like people did in the old days of SEO and spam thousands of websites. You need to be smarter than that.

12. The best way to do this is to have an honest link profile: comment on your favorite relevant blogs, post on relevant forums and build other Web 2.0 sites that are related to your money site.

13. A varied link profile is a must. If you have one thousand blog comments but no other types of posts, this will flag itself as an unnatural source of links.

14. Natural link building is slow and consistent. Don’t spam 1000 sites overnight. Instead, take a natural, slow, steady and relevant approach to link building.

15. If in doubt, build your own network of sites. If you build links on other people’s sites, you’re at their mercy, and they can delete them at any time.

Networking

16. Guest posts are great. You should link up with other influence's in your niche, and act as though you’re all running one big site. That’s important because you then share a larger community.

17. Low quality guest posts are not useful. In the past, people would swap loads of links with other low quality sites. This then allowed them to skip up the search rankings. Search engines are wise to this now.

18. Instead, build real relationships with related companies. A few good, solid guest posts will build your audience.

19. Work with bigger sites. They will help you increase your flow of readers to your own site.

20. Don’t be afraid to work with smaller sites as well. Those are important as you build a grassroots community and you also help other people along the way. This will pay back dividends in the future.