First off, you need to understand that Google (and other search engines) are brilliant. They know that some websites will try to outsmart the system by buying links or hiring people to create backlinks for them. That’s not what SEO for digital marketers is.
When they find someone doing this, they punish those websites by lowering their rankings and making them harder (or impossible) to find for searches that include those spammy keywords. You can read more about it on this page at Google Webmaster Central Blog.
So, if you want your website to be found, then don’t try and cheat the system – instead, follow these simple rules that apply to local and global SEO:
Don’t submit low quality or spammy content
How to create high-quality content? A few factors go towards making a piece of content high quality. The most obvious being spelling and grammar – anything with lots of mistakes will be considered low quality by search engines. Google even has its own ‘webmaster guidelines’ for this sort of thing which you can find here.
Another factor that goes towards high-quality content is the amount of time and effort you put into creating it. Take the time to research your topic, be thorough, add pictures and graphs where necessary and make it as easy to read as possible. If you do all this, then it’ll be seen as a better piece of content than something rushed out in half an hour (and probably full of mistakes).
What type of websites should I submit my website to? Well, Google provides a list for this.
Just follow that list, and you won’t go far wrong.
Don’t try buying backlinks. Google will know if you’re buying backlinks, which will be reflected in your rankings. If you want to improve your rankings, create high-quality content and let natural links come to you.
When creating content ask yourself these questions: What is my objective? Who am I targeting? Why would those people want to read what I’ve written? On which platforms will those people be reading my content? How can I make those platforms as easy as possible for people to navigate?
Title tags
They are an essential element on your web pages, as they appear in search engine results. Not only should you use your primary keyword once but also include related terms twice more throughout the title tag.
So if I were optimizing a post about using vinegar to clean my oven, it would look like this: Using Vinegar To Clean Your Oven – A Simple Guide For Beginners.
Meta tags
Search engines use description meta tags to display short snippets of information describing the content that appears on each page of your website. Although this doesn’t have much to do with how well you rank in the SERPs, it’s still important to use this area to describe what your content is about. An example of a description meta tag would be: A simple, easy-to-understand guide on cleaning your oven with vinegar.
What tools should you use?
You can use many tools to help with your SEO, the most popular being Yoast. You can read more about that tool here.
Many people swear by this tool, but it has its limitations, so if you want something a bit more advanced, look at Serpstat. You can see how they compare in this blog post.
Another free option is SEMrush, which has a nice feature where you can check all of your competitors’ keywords and see how well they’re ranking for them. Not only that, but you can also see their monthly search volume, AdWords cost etc. This is a handy tool to have as it lets you know precisely how well your competitors are doing for specific keywords – then you can go out there and do better.
Wrapping up with an essential tool
It would be best if you also used Google Analytics which will help you track how much traffic your website is getting from organic searches. It’s not the most accurate way to check these things, but it’ll give you an idea of how well your keywords perform for specific pages on your site.
