14 SEO Tips to increase traffic and rankings

Search Engine Optimization used to be a bad word. OK, it’s three bad words, but you know what I mean. It was an arsenal of secret weapons and dirty tricks, all designed to fool the Google bots into thinking you had something really great going on with your website.

But back then, the Google bots were barely thinking at all. And they were easy to trick. Today it’s a different story. Search engine AI is getting more intelligent by the day, maybe even by the hour, and that’s a good thing. Instead of giving top ranking to the sites that play (and pay) the best tricks, the search engines are finally learning to distinguish the valuable content from the cyber drivel.

No, the algorithms aren’t producing 100 percent accuracy, but you can see them closing in on the goal. And dirty tricks haven’t been eradicated from the playing field just yet, but their payoff seems to be getting smaller and shorter lived.

Say what you like about your fear of Artificial Intelligence vanquishing the human race. But when it comes to identifying quality websites, I welcome the era of more intelligent Google bots. Not only is this good news for consumers, those of us trying to find the most useful answers to our questions, but it’s also a boon for web developers and content writers.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your website were being judged by the character of its content, rather than the persistence of dirty tricks, your ability to generate imaginary backlinks and never-ending click bait?

It seems that time is finally coming, and with it a new era of SEO, an era in which Content is King. If we could boil it down to just one thing, I would say, concentrate on producing the highest quality content to answer the questions and offer solutions to the problems of your target audience. And then make it easy for them (and the robots) to find it and relish in its glorious clarity. (Whoops. I think that was actually two or three things.)

So how are we going to do that?

My Top SEO Tips for 2019

SEO Tip #1: Content is king

If it’s not well-written, interesting and useful, or at least 2 out of 3, don’t even bother publishing it. There’s no more room on the internet for hot air and empty fluff. Five or 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom said to crank out at least three or four blog posts a week and maintain a steady, endless flow of wordy content. New data, however, suggests that we have arrived at a new era in which quality trumps quantity. And thank goodness for that.

SEO Tip #2: Make it skimmable

Make pages and articles easy to skim. Be mindful of information architecture. Break up big blocks of text with headings, bullet points and shorter paragraphs. This can give you some of the benefits of “dumbing it down”, without actually dumbing it down.

SEO Tip #3: Build cornerstones

Use cornerstone content and build around it. Write a few major articles with detailed explanations of the main topics of your website. Establish your credibility and demonstrate your expertise. Link to those pillar articles often and make them very easy to find on your site by linking to them from your homepage.

SEO Tip #4: Rescue the orphans

Watch out for orphan articles. Use internal links, cornerstone content and intelligent hierarchy so that old posts don’t get lost. Be sure that those old posts are always easy to find, for both readers and robots.

SEO Tip #5: Metadata

Make your metadata matter. Use strong, keyword-rich file names, titles and alt tags for every image on your website. Provide expressive meta descriptions for all pages. These titles and descriptions are helpful to humans and robots alike.

SEO Tip #6: URL titles

Use SEO friendly URL names. Keep them reasonably short, but also descriptive. In most cases, the best URL will look something like: yourdomain.com/post-title.

SEO Tip #7: Check your links

Check your website for broken links once in a while. Google hates broken links, and so do your readers. They’re not that fun to fix, pretty tedious in fact. But it’s not rocket science either. Here’s a free website that will check the links on your site and identify all the broken ones for you.

SEO Tip #8: Traffic winners

Check your Google analytics to see which blog posts are getting the most traffic. Then make sure those posts are up-to-date., accurate and awesome, with appropriate internal links and Calls To Action.

SEO Tip #9: Traffic losers

Check your Google analytics to see which blogs are getting the least traffic. If you have hundreds of old posts with no traffic, you might consider removing them. They’re just dead weight on your site. At the very least, go through and update them and make sure they’re linked appropriately to other pages on your site.

SEO Tip #10: Images

Use vibrant, engaging images. Take pictures yourself if you can, or use any of the thousands of high-quality, royalty-free pictures from places like Unsplash. If pictures are especially important to your site, hire a professional photographer. Please do NOT just steal pictures from other people’s websites. And please, for the love of God, do not use watermarked images that say shutterstock all over them.

SEO Tip #11: Optimal plugins

Make sure your website has all the essential plugins. But not too many plugins, because that will slow down your website. And nobody wants to use a slow website.

SEO Tip #12: Watch your speed

Speaking of slow websites, you should also use free websites to test your site’s page speed. You might consider hiring a speed specialist. You can find these people on freelance platforms like Upwork, and they have the more specialized programming skills and tools to speed up your site.

SEO Tip #13: Mobile response

Be sure your website is responsive on mobile devices. You probably created the site on a desk top or a laptop, and maybe it looks great on the big screen. But it won’t look the same on an iPhone. Most of your traffic comes from phone and tablets. So be sure your site is responsive on the smaller devices.

SEO Tip #14: Sharing is caring

Don’t just share you posts in the bottomless sea of social media. Find discussion forums relevant to your content. Where? Just type this into your search engine: inurl:forum + “your_keyword”

Conclusions

If you follow these directions on a well-designed website offering a valuable service, you should expect to see some great results within a matter of months. For older sites receiving a facelift, you might see traffic and rankings increase within three or four months. On brand new domains, it could take more like eight to ten months. But your patience and diligence will pay off.

Contact us today to talk about how we can improve the design, content and SEO of your website.