Creating a website or a blog is always an exciting prospect. Doubly so for a business website, which is necessary for staying ahead of the curve and reaching potential customers. The problem with having a website is that it’s difficult to get a good authority score for your website. It takes time to build authority and backlinks and the other things you need. The process seems to happen faster for some websites and brands than it does for others, with some anxiously waiting and getting nothing but disappointing results.
The difference between brands that succeed and brands that don’t is their knowledge of SEO. Without a good understanding of SEO and how it works, you’ll always get disappointing results. It’s understandable to be so frustrated that you want to give it all up. You shouldn’t give up though. At least, not until you’ve gone through these top SEO tactics to dominate your competitors. Keep them in mind when putting together an SEO strategy and see how they work for you.
Learn From the Competition
The first order of business is to learn from your competition – and to learn about them. The more you know about the competition the more you understand what you are up against and what you need to do. A good place to start is seeing how many incoming high quality links the competition has. This will give you an idea of how many incoming links your own website needs. Most of them will probably have some high quality localcitations, guest posts, link insertions or editorial links that you can try to emulate. There are many link buildingservices that offer quality backlinks, you just need to browse around.
Also look at their ranking on search engines, what keywords they use to get there, and what meta tags they use for their content. You can’t surpass the competition if you don’t even know what the competition is. Take some time to analyze your competition and research them as part of your overall plan of attack.
Let’s look at an example of this. Survey sites – and websites that review those sites – are pretty popular and if you just search Google for something like “get paid to survey” you’ll find a plethora of results. These results will include a combination of actual survey websites and companies, list articles about these websites, and review sites for them. The key difference between the ranking website is their Domain/Page authority and their incoming backlinks.
Analyze Keywords – Both Your Own and the Competitions
Optimizing your website is great, but it doesn’t mean much overall if you are optimizing for the wrong keywords. There are lots of tools out there to find great keywords. You want to use keywords that are being searched for a lot. Another thing to consider is long tail keywords. These are phrases that are up to five words long. They bring in highly targeted top quality traffic. Finally, make sure that you take advantage of evergreen keywords. These are keywords that are always relevant and will generate traffic for years to come.
SEMRush is a fantastic resource for SEO research. Just enter the URL of any website and the tool will show you the keywords that they rank for, where they rank for them, how often those keywords are searched, a competition score, and the overall ranking for the URL. Put in some URLs from your website and your competitors and see what you get.
Write Better Content
Content is king with SEO, but it has to be high quality content. You need to have unique and interesting content that people can’t get elsewhere. As you write content, keep in mind the goal is to have people enjoy it and share it with others. You should focus on consumable content like tutorials, lists, and “How To” content. These are the content types that generate the most traffic. It helps to include information and supporting facts and references to your article too. Be sure to include keywords and then link those words to other relevant information and web pages. When someone sees that you have created a link to them, they are encouraged to then link back to you. This gives both of you a little boost in the rankings. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for content and keywords, then there are lots of great references and tools to help. Other things to include in content are visual examples such as images, videos, screenshots, and charts.
This is another case where how you promote the content can be as important as the content itself. For an example of this, try googling “how to boil an egg”. It’s possibly the most generic search term in the world. Thousands of people have written about how to boil the perfect egg. The ones that rank high are the most well-known names in the industry, such as Martha Stewart and AllRecipes. It’s even more exciting to analyze the big names and see what they do. Who really has the best content? How are they doing it? Once again, it comes back to learning from others.
Create Deep Links to Other Parts of Your Website
Deep linking is when you create links from one page of your website to another within content. You should always link to internal pages using anchor text that involves at least three keywords from the target page. Not only does that help with rankings, but it ensures that people stay on your website for longer. How easy it is to create backlinks can depend on your website and the kind of content you write, but no doubt you’ve seen examples of this during your regular web browsing.
Deep linking can take some time to do, but it is one of the most important things you can do for SEO. Be sure to link back to evergreen content as much as possible because this is content that will always work for you.
Optimize Every Aspect of the Website
Every aspect of a website needs to be optimized; from the content itself to meta tags, headings, and subheadings. The H-tags (H1, H2, etc.) are an important part of organizing information on a web page. There should be just one H1 tag on a page. This is the largest header and it is usually the title of the page of the article. From there, you can break the rest of the content up using H2 and, if necessary, H3 and beyond.
Next comes the titel and alt tags that are used with images to describe said images. These can also be optimized with keywords to improve rankings. Keep in mind that most search engines allow for people to search for images – and by images. When users look for particular images, search engines use keywords and alt tags to find the right images to display. This is why you should always use relevant alt tags with images to make it easier for people to discover your content through image searches.
Every heading tag should contain a keyword you want to rank for. As search engines focus on headings over content, they need to include keywords. That sounds like a lot to take in but a little practice makes perfect.
Don’t forget to analyze yourself and your competition and see where you rank. Study the competition and learn from them and use those lessons to create new and better methods for your own SEO strategy. Don’t forget about the importance of off-site SEO too. Create effective links to the website and encourage users to share and like your content to give it that extra little boost.
Chris Mcdonald has been the lead news writer at complete connection. His passion for helping people in all aspects of online marketing flows through in the expert industry coverage he provides. Chris is also an author of tech blog Area19delegate. He likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts and plucking fat bass guitar strings.