Are you trying to use SEO strategies to get your website ranking on the first page of Google?
You might be spinning your wheels if you don’t realize that SEO is in constant evolution! What worked last week might not work today.
If you want to stay ahead of the curve and ahead of your competitors, read on for the SEO best practices for 2018!
1. Invest Your Time in Blogging
From an SEO perspective, blogging is still a “must” for most businesses in 2018.
Setting up a blog on your website is a simple task and works well to establish your place as an expert in your industry.
Outdated content on your website is not a good strategy, so plan to keep your blog updated as often as possible.
If you find yourself creatively stuck, don’t feel pigeon-holed into one kind of content. Blog posts can include infographics, images, and video content to keep it attention-getting and fresh.
2. Create Longer Content
Speaking of content, try mixing in some longer content into your blogging strategy.
Longer format content can be one of your strongest local SEO tools.
Rather than focusing only on short 500-word blog posts, mix it up with 1500 or 2000 word posts that include mixed media.
This will allow you to be more creative and informative when educating your audience. Longer content tends to be more appealing to audiences and more likely to be shared on social media.
3. Absolutely Do Keyword Research
While you’re creating blog content, don’t neglect proper keyword research beforehand.
Measure and analyze the metrics for a number of keywords before you decide on topics and which keywords are a good fit for your company.
A few important metrics to pay attention to are the keyword difficulty, search volume, clicks, and return rate.
Paying attention to these metrics and using a tool like Google Keyword Planner will help your keyword strategy improve over time so that you’re optimized for the right audience.
4. Use Long-Tail Keywords
Speaking of keywords, one of our biggest local SEO tips for 2018 is to pay attention to long-tail keywords.
People are typing longer keywords when using Google.
That means rather than using a keyword like “recipes,” try ranking for a longer keyword such as “breakfast recipes for autumn.”
Long-tail keywords are likely to attract visitors with higher purchase intent, so your conversion rate will improve.
5. Optimize Your Website Images
If your website has a lot of images and looks amazing, then you need to make sure that those images are optimized.
What does this mean? Images can seriously slow down your loading times. Slow page speeds can increase bounce rates, especially if your traffic is coming from search engines or social media.
So focus on using images that are high quality and are small in size. Don’t forget linking keywords and using ALT tags for your images for best SEO results.
6. Appropriate Linking
You might already know that external links are essential when creating blog content.
It’s easy to become careless with your links.
You don’t want your visitors to think that your content is filled with spam links from terrible sources.
To solve this problem, focus on linking to high quality, authoritative sources.
7. Don’t Pay For Backlinks
Backlinks are a great way to get more traffic to your website and help your SEO.
That said, you should be very careful about your link building strategy to avoid penalties from Google.
Your pages will rank better if the backlinks to those pages are natural. That means that these backlinks need to come from reputable sources.
Don’t pay for backlinks, avoid “link farm” websites, and focus on this type of link building as a long-term strategy instead of a quick win.
8. Don’t Use Dynamic URLs
Understanding the difference between dynamic URLs and static URLs can be a huge benefit to your SEO.
A static URL does not change, as long as the HTML of the page doesn’t change. A dynamic URL changes based on the code, such as a product page, search result, or customer ID.
Pages with static URLs perform better because search engines handle them much better due to consistency in text and keywords. People will remember static URLs much easier.
Dynamic URLs tend to have lower click-through rates and lower keyword prominence.
9. Do Not Stuff Keywords
This local SEO tip is a no-brainer that should be familiar to anyone working in SEO.
Don’t stuff your pages and blog posts with too many keywords or irrelevant keywords. Don’t try to hide extra keywords in the content using transparent font color.
Follow the best practices for the number of keywords you should be using in a given piece of content.
Failing to do so could cost you your page rank.
10. Don’t Duplicate Titles or Content
Vary your content. Make sure the titles and the keywords you use are different for each page of your website.
As your local SEO guide, this can’t be stressed enough. Duplicating titles and keywords is NOT a strategy for ranking. It will only make it more difficult for search engines to properly index your page.
11. Try Guest Posting
As you focus on your own website content, keep in mind how you can contribute elsewhere.
Get involved in your industry or local community by writing articles for other websites.
Include backlinks to your website if you’re able. Guest posting will drive quality traffic to your website and continue to establish you as an authority in your niche.
These are the SEO Best Practices for 2018!
Now you’ve got a list of some of the most important dos and don’ts and SEO best practices for 2018! You’ll be well on your way to getting your site ranking high and staying there!
Putting these strategies into place (and avoiding the SEO traps) will ensure that your site beats out your competitors’ sites.
With a steady stream of new content, you’ll attract the right kind of customers – the ones with high purchase intent!
Does all of this SEO talk sound like Greek to you? Want to partner with a team to help you reach your online goals? Schedule a free consultation with us and let’s make it happen!
Learn more about SEO for your business. Contact WSI Proven Results for a FREE consultation.
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