Publish Great Content
Top quality content is the king; when it comes to driving traffic to your site there simply no substitute. But what is great content? It’s all well and good putting together a well written piece that really engages the reader, but first things first you’ve got to make sure that people can find it.
This is why it’s imperative to do a bit of research before you start putting pen to paper, or hand to keyboard. Before even starting to create a piece of content you need to consider how your target audience might be searching for the topic you’re covering.
Using tools like Google Keyword Planner you’ll be able to not only generate keyword ideas but also check the search volume of certain keywords. Once you’ve decided on your keyword (or keywords) be sure to regularly include them within the body of your content (around 1-2%), and also within your titles and sub-headings.
Despite the importance of ranking well, it’s critical not to sacrifice the quality of your content for SEO purposes.
Update Content
There’s a common myth in content marketing that the more content you produce the better. But what’s the point of churning out reams and reams of content that’s not actually serving its purpose; which is to rank well and drive traffic?
Not only is publishing article after article on your site time consuming, if these articles aren’t relevant then they’re actually diluting your sites authority and user experience. A much better way of ensuring your blog is up-to-date is simply to update your current content.
Tweaking and updating your current content to make it better is often a much more productive tactic than reconstructing something from scratch. This Hubspot guide on to updating and republishing old content gives a great insight into how effective this strategy can be.
Link Building/Link worthy site
One of the key things that Google looks at when determining search rankings is how trustworthy a site is. Some of the key things that indicate how trustworthy a site is are the DA (Domain Authority) and TF (Trust Flow).
These metrics are determined by the amount of other trusted or quality sites that link to your content. The best way to get people linking back to your content is to ensure that what you produce is quality, unique and helpful.
Another way that you can generate inbound links to your site is by guest posting. There are sites that will allow you to post blogs on their site including a backlink providing the content is well written and relevant to their audience.
Meta data, Title Tags and URL Structure
A title tag is the headline of your content when it’s displayed in search engines; Meta data is the snippet of content that comes below the title tag. Both play large role when it comes to search rankings, so it’s important to make sure you use them correctly.
It’s important that your title tags and meta data contain keywords and give people an insight as to what the content is actually about.
The cardinal sin committed by so many website owners is to not manually enter your meta data. If you do this then Google just takes the first 160 characters of your content and displays this as your meta. This content often doesn’t contain any relevant keywords or entice people to actually click-through.
Another thing to take a look at when creating content is the URL of the page it will be hosted on. It’s a good idea to include your keyword(s) within the URL as this is another indication to Google to what your content is about.
Images and ALT Text
Images can be extremely powerful within your content. They’re very engaging for the reader but you need to make sure that all images you use are of the right quality and size. The general rule is to make the images as small as possible, without compromising the visual quality.
On top of this you should always give each image you upload some ‘ALT Text’. As search engines can only understand text, the ‘ALT Text’ allows search engines to understand what the image actually is. You should use this to explain what the image actually is, whilst also trying to include your keywords; ALT Text should be as short and specific as possible.
The above are just a few of the many methods that some of the top marketing companies such as Equinile use to boost their clients search rankings; however by following them you should be able to improve rankings and increase your website traffic.
