Perfecting the Art of SEO: More than Just Keywords

As you know, perfecting the art of SEO is vital if you want your content to have a long-lasting presence on the web. Not only will it bring more traffic to your website, it can help you get more business and boost your authority across your industry. But contrary to popular belief, SEO involves much more than just choosing the right keywords.

While keywords are a foundation for a strong SEO plan, high-quality SEO goes beyond selecting a keyword and implements multiple strategies to get your content to the top of an internet search. Keep reading to learn several necessary techniques to perfect the art of SEO.

Optimize Your Keyword Placement

After you’ve chosen the keyword phrase your content will be focused on, you need to properly place the keyword inside the content. According to Moz, one of the leading SEO resources on the web, there are several vital places to place your keyword.

The first place your keyword needs to go is in the page title. This is one of the first places crawler bots check when searching for content to present to users. Your headline or H1 should also include a keyword or have a comparatively similar phrase.

In the body text, your keyword should be included toward the top within the first 100 words or so. Don’t overstuff keywords as this has long been penalized by Google. Instead include a keyword repetition in the beginning, middle, and end of your blog post or piece of content depending on its length.

The URL you create should also include the keyword as Google and other search engines look to this for relevancy to the content. Additionally the images you include in your page should have the keyword in the title and image alt attributes. This boosts the likelihood of your image appearing on image search thus drawing more traffic to your page.

Build Content that is Sharable

When people come across great content, they often do one of two things. They either share it with their social network or link to it in their own content. While links to your content directly increases your SEO page rankings, social sharing also has an amplifying effect as well.

When content is shared on social media and extends beyond the content creator’s network, its audience broadens and the opportunity for people to link to it increases. Social sharing signals are an important indicator for search engines as they rank results on their pages.

Each webpage should include easily accessible social sharing buttons that are targeted to your unique audience. Another way to make sharing easier is to create short and descriptive URLs that help both identify the content and make it easy to copy & paste.

Ensure Your Content is Mobile Friendly

As more people begin to browse online content on their smartphones and tablets, mobile content becomes more important to SEO rankings. And since Google is releasing an update that will penalize sites that do not have mobile-friendly content in April of this year, now is the time to make the change.

People don’t just use mobile devices while they’re on the go. More frequently people are replacing their desktops and laptops with mobile devices in their own homes. Besides becoming more frequently used, mobile devices also encourage social sharing.

Create for Humans with Bots in Mind

While you should never create your content exclusively for the internet crawler bots, you still need to make sure your whole site is crawlable. While Google and other search engines keep improving their automated bots in order to provide the most reputable and relevant content to each user, automated bots play a pivotal role in SEO rankings.

Ensure that every page on your site is unique and that duplicate content does not exist. When bots find duplicate content, this will hurt your search rankings.

Additionally, make sure not to block the crawler bots from exploring your site. While you can intelligently block the bots, you have to be careful not to stop them from indexing all of your content for search engine results. This will limit what is available to search engine users.

If you need to take a page down use a 503 status code instead of the 404. Additionally, if you’re redirecting to a new page use a 301 redirect whenever possible as this will allow the bots to easily keep on crawling.