Why not planes crash more frequently from mechanical failure? Considering all the moving parts inside a plane, it seems that something would break fairly easily. So, why doesn’t that happen? 1 main motive: checklists.
Before pilots push the button to get taxiing and take-off, they perform an extensive pre-flight checklist to make certain everything is working exactly as it ought to be.
Entrepreneurs hoping for a powerful Vancouver SEO company to help them in Google rankings may take a lesson here. They can create a checklist of their own to make sure everything is ideal for their next site post. No, an SEO checklist will not defend you from crashing and burning. But it is going to help ensure that your article has the best opportunity it needs to rank high in Google.
Thus, before you publish your next piece of web content, then run it through the following 9-point checklist for the very best SEO tips.
1. Pick a good keyword to concentrate on.
The very first step is to simply pick the search term or term you are interested in getting the post to show up for. When I am writing about the very best dog toys for small dogs, I’ll want to learn what folks are really searching for.
The easiest way to do that is use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool which will show you an estimate for any search term. (Although Keyword Planner is free, you may need to set up an AdWords account to obtain access.)
For example, I discovered that “small dog toys” receives 590 monthly hunts — greater than any other related mixture of words. However, I’m not entirely prepared to get started writing about this topic. To begin with, I need to do some research.
2. Research the contest.
Now that I have a word I wish to try to rank for, I’m going to go undercover and do some recon!
Jump over to a “private browsing” mode on your web browser (“Incognito” from Chrome, “Private” in Safari and Firefox, “InPrivate” on Internet Explorer) and visit Google.com. (At my firm, we do “private mode” because we don’t need Google to use our past search history to determine what we see on the search results page)
3. Write the ideal content.
Now that you understand what your competition looks like, it is time to produce the material that’s going to blow those people out of the water. This is perhaps the toughest part, but it’s the most important. It needs to be amazing.
I don’t care if you are developing a blog post, e-commerce page or sales-landing page. It needs to be better than the rest, or neither Google nor your audience will ever take note.
4. Put the keyword in your page title.
This should be a no-brainer, but I’ll state it anyhow: Your page title should contain your keyword, but it does not mean it needs to be exact (although it can be).
Additionally, the title also has to be interesting enough that people will really need to click it! A good illustration of this would be PT from PTMoney.com, who wrote a fantastic article about “making extra money.” However, rather than a dull title, like “Make Extra Money,” he titled it “52 Ways to Make Extra Money.” Now that is something I would want to see.
5. Put the keyword in your header.
It’s possible to organize most web pages by having a massive title on top, followed by several sub-headers throughout the webpage (like the sub-headers in this article).
This organization is helpful not only for people in skimming blog-post articles, it is helpful in showing Google exactly what your site post is about. Therefore, be sure to use your exact keyword phrase at least once in your sub-headers.
3. Put the keyword in the title and alt-tag of your picture.
Next, if your blog post includes pictures, you can use those pictures to cement the notion to Google about your post’s topic. There are two ways to do this:
- The image name
- The image alt tag
To change the image name, only change the name of the picture on your computer before uploading. Instead of a file referred to as “2831274.jpg,” it is possible to rename it something like “small dogs1.jpg.”
The “alt tag” is something which you designate after you upload the photo to your site. Without getting too technical, the alt tag is simply the text which the browser will show if the photo can’t load for any reason.
7. Use the keyword in the URL and from the post.
Another way Google can ascertain what your blog post is about is your URL. To put it differently, we are discussing what’s after the “. com” in your URL (or .net, .org, or whatever you use). By way of instance, which of these URLs do you believe Google will like better when determining whether or not to show a specific page?
You are right if you guessed that the second one. While the former might not completely kill your SEO efforts, the latter definitely can help show Google exactly what the article is about.
8. Insert internal links.
If you aren’t talking about your best content, why should anybody else care? For this reason, it’s important that your best SEO content is connected to internally by other web pages on your website.
Yes, this means you might want to go back and edit several older posts to add links to the new, incredible content.
9. The most-important SEO suggestion: Get external links.
External links are links from websites aside from your own. Google relies heavily on external links to find out how good a post is. And that is logical, doesn’t it? You can talk about yourself and your skills daily, but no one will believe you. But as soon as some other people begin bragging about you, others take note.
