If you are reading this guide, you probably already know about the importance of SEO. You probably also know what a challenge tackling it can be.
Today we are presenting 6 little know secrets of SEO which will help you gain an advantage over your competition. When properly followed, these strategies will help you rank as high as possible in organic search engine results.
SEO Secret#1: Use Your Image Alt Tab Attribute
This is one of the most ignored SEO strategies. People either forget about it or do not think it is significant enough to warrant a second look. It’s important to note, however, that the Image Alt Tab attribute is important in helping your website show up in relevant keyword searches. Google and other search engines use the image’s keywords incorporated in its Alt attribute to relate those images to the site’s content. By simply adding these keywords in the Alt attribute, the search engines index the images much better and faster… which increases overall search traffic.
SEO Secret#2: Speed Up Your Site!
This is one area where speeding will not get you a ticket! Google considers your website’s speed as one of several ranking factors. Since the search giant is focused on improving end user experience, it goes without saying that your website pages should download and display quickly since this can (an will) make a great deal of difference in how your site ranks. Keep in mind that there are many hidden factors that can influence the speed of your website: hidden Java Scripts, the size of the images used and content that has to be accessed over and over again. There are many tests that can help you determine your site’s speed.
SEO Secret#3: ‘Listicals’
Listicals (or Listicles, as they are also known) are the Holy Grail of Blogging – the backbone of your content marketing strategy. Listicles or Top 10/Top 5 lists are a way of simplifying content so that it becomes simpler for your reader. Everyone (and we mean everyone) loves list-based posts… so much so that they tend to be shared more often via social media. We recommend writing Top 3/Top 5/ Top 7 based articles. Anything more tends to get overwhelming to your end reader.
SEO Secret#4: Backlink Alert!
Backlinks are the links that come to your site from other sites. Naturally, it is important to create quality backlinks that come from authoritative sites since Google then considers your site as being informative enough for users to want to visit it.
PLEASE NOTE: Google upgrades its algorithms regularly to ensure that backlinks do not contain spammy or low quality links. It is VERY important to consider the quality and the authority of the site linking back to yours.
SEO Secret#5: Use Videos
Videos are the most commonly searched items on Google which is why your site must capitalize on this SEO opportunity. The videos you use should provide information and be of value to the visitors. It’s equally important to use interactive elements (quizzes, call to action, surveys etc) to guide the users to the next logical step once they are done viewing your video.
OF NOTE: host your videos on your own domain rather than YouTube or Vimeo. While the latter do hold SEO value, they end up taking away some of the credit for your content.
SEO Secret#6: Update Your Old Content
If you are not updating your old content, you’re letting it die a horrible death. You must keep generating content for your older posts, which can be accomplished by regularly updating it with more current information, as well as linking it with newer blog articles. This helps Google’s bots crawl the content all over and serve it up to your target audience. This is a proven SEO secret that can help you grow your readership steadily over the next few months.
We hope these 6 proven SEO secrets help you optimize your site. Please be aware that this is not the complete list and we have even more tips, strategies and SEO tools to assist in your website optimization efforts.
