A Guide to the Most Effective SEO Techniques

There are hundreds of small, incremental SEO techniques you can use to improve the reach of your website. Good content, keywords, links, site optimization, and smart design are all pieces of the big picture. Think of your SEO as an ecosystem.

We’ll take a look at the most important elements and how to use them so that you can employ the most effective SEO techniques.

Consistency Is Key

One of the most effective SEO techniques is often overlooked due to its simplicity. Consistency. Remember that when building your SEO strategy every little bit counts. Keep adding, keep contributing, keep uploading to your site. While we all look for quick and easy ways to stay ahead of the search engines and improve our site’s search results, Google reward steady, consistent work.

Related: Basics of SEO

Why? Search engines love updated, fresh, relevant content. This is by design, as we live in a world of constantly developing products, news and information.

A search algorithm that only looked for “the top” of anything would only bring back the most trafficked content for the past 20 years. If you’re searching for “portable music” you’ll find titles like “Best Digital Audio Players of 2017” more frequently than you will find, say, an America Online review of a 1997 Sony Walkman CD player.

Keep Your Content Unique

Search engines reward user experience, and the measurement of that user experience is unique and engaging content.Whatever you post to your site make sure you are providing value. Readers want your expert opinion on something. You have knowledge to share on a subject they are looking for.

Related: Building a Strong Content Marketing Plan & Strategy

So share that knowledge to the best of your ability. When you do your job by creating an authentic, well written, informative article, you increase your audience and in turn, the search engines take notice.

Get Specific With Your Content

Instead of posting an article with a general topic like, “Healthy Eating Plans”, you can create a better user experience for your visitors by getting specific and using “7 Key Elements to the Paleo Diet”. Yes anyone can find content about healthy eating options, but your blog is catering to those who are interested in paleo.

The more specific your content is, the more likely it will answer the user’s search query. The article also has a better chance of ranking on page 1 since there’s most likely less competition for that specific content as opposed to the broader topic.

Use The Tools Available To You

Writing the content is step one, but in order to get the most visibility possible on your blog posts, it’s crucial to optimize the posts with relevant keywords.

At Power Digital, we use a variety of keyword research tools to identify all of the keyword opportunities available to our clients. From Google’s Keyword Planner to keywordtool.io there are a number of tools available to identify keyword variations. In general, there are three types of keywords: navigational, informational and transactional. Navigational refers to queries in which users are searching for

Related: Are You Choosing the Right Keywords? A Guide to Search Intent

If you are writing content for your blog, this content will most likely be more informational and therefore you would want to optimize it with informational keywords. For example, a good informational blog topic would be “causes of dog anxiety.” This post would bring in people who are simply looking to learn more about what causes dog anxiety, and aren’t necessarily looking to buy anything yet.

If your product helps with dog anxiety the product page would use a keyword that’s more transactional like “natural remedies for dog anxiety.” This keyword is more transactional because people are looking for a solution and most likely wanting to buy a product.

The next effective SEO technique is to make sure your links are good. Links work by letting search engines know that your site is popular, which is why the other sites have linked to you. But not all links are created equal. There’s something called “link juice” which describes the difference in value of a link from, say, your cousin’s blog to the History Channel website. One carries more weight, or juice. By working to create good, relevant content and reaching out to the big websites with your content, you can hopefully land more links with juice.

Related: The Ultimate Guide To Internal Link Building Strategy for SEO

Another link-related issue affecting SEO is whether your links are humming along smoothly or are broken. Search engines ding sites if they have a lot of broken links. A site with heaps of broken links will hurt your SEO. Fortunately there are ways to tell if you have broken links. Use sites like Brokenlinkcheck.com and deadlinkchecker.com to help you find the SEO-damaging links on your site.

Don’t Forget These

Now that we’ve gone after the big SEO techniques that everyone’s using, let’s step back and take a look at some of the obvious resources you might be forgetting in the rush to please the search engines.

While everyone is obsessed with making Google happy, don’t forget that Yahoo! and Bing are players too. The internet sees 6.5 billion searches a day. While Google accounts for roughly 80% of all search engine traffic, the 20% left to Bing, Yahoo! and others means more than 1 billion searches are done each day outside of the Google bubble. Be sure your content is Bing and Yahoo! friendly as well.

Social Media

Organic social media amplifies your message to cover a wider audience and boost your visibility. Web crawlers can’t measure how popular your content is on Instagram, but they can measure the boost in traffic your site gets from Facebook click throughs.

Related: Integrating Social Media Strategies with Other Channels

Although people tend to stay on one platform, say their Instagram, Twitter or Facebook accounts, the percentage that do hop from platform to platform is increasing as mobile devices use faster processors and the transition becomes quicker. Make sure your site is optimized for mobile users.

Website Speed

The last effective SEO technique we’ll mention here is making sure your website speed and overall design are easy for the search engines to read. Your header at the top of your website should fit seamlessly into your content and your pages should load quickly.

It may seem like a lot but these are all little tiles in the mosaic that contribute to your overall SEO picture. Each and every one, individual piece helps. Consistency, content, keywords and cohesive links are the mainstays for SEO improvement while social media, website speed and page design help a bit as well.

Follow these effective SEO techniques along with publishing unique, informative content targeted to your audience on a regular basis and you’ll see your SEO improve.