11 Best SEO Tips | Top 11 Search Engine Optimization Tips | You should need Know

11 Best SEO Tips | Top 11 Search Engine Optimization Tips | You should need Know

The Top 11 SEO Tips contained in this tutorial were created after years of experimentation and practical application with hundreds of client websites, mostly with final results of achieving higher ranking within the first page of search engine results. We hope you find these SEO tips valuable.

Before pilots push the button for taxiing and take-off, they perform an extensive pre-flight checklist to make sure everything is functioning exactly as it should be.

Entrepreneurs hoping for strong SEO (search engine optimization) rankings might take a lesson here. They can create a checklist of their own to make sure everything is perfect for their next website article. No, an SEO checklist won't protect you from crashing and burning. But it will help ensure that your post has the best chance it needs to rank high in Google. 

So, before you publish your next piece of web content, run it through the following 11-point checklist for the best SEO tips.

No. 1 : Create Trust

Matt McGee, Editor-In-Chief, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land

"Focus on creating trust through everything you do online and offline," says McGee. He explains how you have two audiences; search engines and humans. Search engines like Google displays webpages it trusts to searchers. Humans trust Google to show them webpages that answer their questions.

If you create content humans trust, and throw in some of the technical work to make sure Google can process your content, then Google will trust your website and according to McGee, "...your natural traffic will grow and grow and grow. You won't have to worry about algorithm changes. Your website will be crawled more deeply, your content will get indexed faster, and you'll be able to rank for more competitive terms faster."

No. 2 : Produce Virality

Rand Fishkin, Founder and Wizard of Moz, Moz

Fishkin says one of his favorite SEO tips he recommends is to "Create a site, service, product or hook that has a natural, viral feedback component accessible to search engines." He goes on to explain that this is done through links, embedded content (like infographics, see below), badges, and incentives to share. As examples, he points to SimplyHired's job trends charts, OKCupids' data-driven blog posts (new posts no longer being produced, but still a great example), and Mixcloud's social voting/promotion. Fishkin could have included Moz's own Beginner's Guide to SEO and other Moz guides in his list, which have been seen millions of times. Fishkin says that once you figure out how to produce content that spreads, in many ways you've already won the SEO game. "The key components then become content, keywords and a scalable business model."

No. 3. Write the best content.

Now that you know what your competition looks like, it's time to create the content that is going to blow those folks out of the water. This is perhaps the most difficult part, but it's the most important. It needs to be amazing.

I don't care if you are creating a blog post, ecommerce store page or sales-landing page. It needs to be better than the rest, or else neither Google nor your audience will ever take note.

For an example of an article I recently wrote -- with just this goal in mind -- check out "How to Become a Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide.". My goal with that post was to write superb content about that topic. How did I do?

No. 4. Put the keyword in your page title.

This should be a no-brainer, but I'll say it anyway: Your page title should contain your keyword, but that doesn't mean it has to be exact (though it can be).

Additionally, the title must also be interesting enough that people will actually want to click on it! A good example of this would be PT from PTMoney.com, who wrote a great post about "making extra money." However, rather than a boring title, like "Make Extra Money," he titled it "52 Ways to Make Extra Money." Now that is something I would want to read.

No. 5. Pick a good keyword to focus on.

The first step is to simply pick the search term or phrase you want the post to show up for. If I am writing about the best dog toys for small dogs, I'll want to find out what people are actually searching for. 

The easiest way to do this is use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool that will show you an estimate for any search phrase. (Although Keyword Planner is free, you may need to set up an AdWords account to gain access.)

For example, I noticed that "small dog toys" receives 590 monthly searches -- higher than any other related combination of words. However, I'm still not totally ready to start writing about this topic. First, I need to do some research. 

No. 6. Research the competition.

Now that I have a term I want to try to rank for, I'm going to go undercover and do some recon!

Jump over to your "private browsing" mode on your web browser ("Incognito" in Chrome, "Private" in Safari and Firefox, "InPrivate" on Internet Explorer) and head to Google.com. (At my company, we do "private mode" because we don't want Google to use our past search history to influence what we see on the search results page.)

Take a look at all the content on page one of Google, ignoring any ad results at the top. The 10 (or so) results are your competition! What are they missing? Can you do better?

 No. 7 : Discover What Your Competitors are Doing

It’s a fact and one of my Top 10 SEO Tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have, will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.

Your analysis of competitors should include these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the search engines
• Quantity AND quality of incoming links (prioritized)
• What keywords are in the title of linking page?
• % of links containing specific keywords in the link text
• The Google PageRank™ or MozRank of linking pages
• The popularity of the linking domain and the linking page (measured by links & mentions)

Aside from using some of the awesome SEO software mentioned on this website, here are some things I personally do when researching a competitor:

• Click the link to their Site Map page and see what keyword you find in the links
• Get a savvy web person to find and parse their XML Site Map to find keywords in page names
• View the HTML title and meta tags of your top competitors to compile a list of needed content

No. 8 : Write Very Linkable & Sharable Content

An article is not a sexy thing to look at here in today’s online marketing world. Generic content can’t be slapped together and thrown online with the hope that it will get high ranking for the life of that page of content. Think about the book the Long Tail that I linked to above. I do because the content was meanful and useful to me in my career as an SEO Expert. The content could have these attributes if it has any hope of earning and sustaining higher ranking in the search engine results (many of these came directly from Google):

• The content is useful
• The content is original
• You can’t help but link to it
• There are supportive facts and references
• There’s enough detail that nobody can memorize it
• Something fun or interesting is included (like video)
• It’s not just blah, blah, blah, content
• There’s enough call to action to invoke engagement
• There are visual examples, charts, and references
• You had multiple contributors who all link to the content
• You thank or compliment someone who shares it with others
• You have an offer, discount, or promotion included
• How To’s and tutorials are a great way to get people to link
• Create a controversy
• Answer questions
• Conduct research & discuss the results
• Get involved with social media
• Create lists (Top 50 Link Building Techniques, etc)
• Get a blog and establish yourself as an authority
• Run a service or create a product (ie: Firefox extension)

No. 9 : Optimize Your Title and Meta Tags

HTML titles and meta tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Experts have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them and what happens when you optimize them.

The meta “keywords” tag won’t be discussed in to much detail here, since Google has announced that they do not use the meta keywords tag in their ranking criteria. Because Google has 64 percent market share in search, that should be enough to convince you to not spend a lot of time on this attribute.

Optimizing Your Homepage Title

There are different theories about how long your homepage title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), my Top 11 SEO tips for the title on anything other than the homepage would be to keep the title under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some (including myself) argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion. Let’s take a look at Amazon and Ebay homepage titles.

Optimizing Your Homepage Meta Description

Same best practice applies here. Get those top terms into a description that isn’t spammy and is a clear indicator of what your website is about. Below are the meta descriptions from eBay and Amazon.

The rule of thumb here is to get your most important keywords into your homepage title and meta description.

Optimizing Subpage Titles and Meta Tags

Let’s take a break for a moment and discuss Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Bounce Rate. When you perform a search in a search engine, what shows up in your web browser is called an impression. When you make a selection, that selection is called a click. Google and other search engines record each impression and each click to help them understand which listings are being clicked on the most. They also record patterns (so stop thinking about getting all your friends to search for and click your listing). If the majority of normal search volume selects your listing, you’ll have a higher CTR and higher ranking; same applies for Sponsored Ads by the way.

That being said, if a healthy percentage of searchers return to Google’s search results (called a Bounce) and select a different listing, your CTR value will be reduced and ultimately so will your ranking.

To get and stay at the top of the search results, you need to be the most attractive listing in the search result, and you need to provide enough content to prevent the searcher from leaving your website to find a different listing.

This one SEO tip could make or break your SEO campaign.Click-Through Rate (CTR) plays an instrumental role in how relevant Google thinks your website is. By compelling users to click with clear call-to-actions (buy, order, download, beat, fix, etc) and by using value propositions (guaranteed, on sale now, etc), one can improve their CTR and search engine ranking. Oh, don’t forget to squeeze your keywords in there as well.

If you ever forget this SEO tip, just perform a search in Google for “title tag principles”, where you’ll find my listing invoking these principles. Another great resource for learning more about writing effective meta tags can be found on the Splash Copywriter blog, entitled Meta description masterclass: a data-driven guide to the little search snippets that win you big business

Here’s some sample syntax:

<title>Call to Action, Keywords, & Value Proposition (under 66 characters)</title>

<meta name="description" content="Differently worded call to action, keywords, & value proposition (under 160 characters)" />

<meta name="keywords" content="one to five keywords separated by commas" />

No. 10 : Use Title and ALT Attributes

Using the title attribute is a direct method of telling the search engines and the user more information about where a link will take them if they click through it. It’s also a W3C standard for making your page accessible to those who are visually impared. In other words, blind folks can navigate through your website using a special browser that reads title and ALT attributes. Sample syntax might be:

<a href="https://www.wiideman.com/blog/tools-software/semrush" title="SEO Software to Help You Get Higher Search Engine Ranking">SEO Software</a>

The ALT Attribute is used for the same reasons as the title attribute, but is specifically for describing an image to the search engine and to the visually impared. Here’s how you might use ALT attribute in an image tag:

<img src="/images/logo-top11seotips.jpg" alt="Top 11 SEO Tips – Search Engine Marketing Tips and SEO Software Featured by SEO Expert Steve Wiideman">

No. 11 : Optimizing File Nomenclatures

Whenever possible, you should save your images, media, and web pages with the keywords in the file names. For example, if your keyword phrase is "golf putters" you’ll want to save the images used on that page as golf-putters-01.jpg or golf_putters_01.jpg (either will work). It’s not confirmed, but many SEO’s have experienced improvement in ranking by renaming images and media. You also may receive visits from Google Images and other media search queries.

More important is your web page’s filename, since many search engines now allow users to query using "inurl:" searches. For fun, try this query in Google (copy/paste): “ebook site:.com filetype:pdf”. You’ll find all you can eat eBooks (you’re welcome).

Your filename for the golf putters page could be golf-putters.html or golf_putters.html. Anytime there is an opportunity to display or present content, do your best to insure the content has the keywords in the filename (as well as a Title or ALT attribute).

You may need to contact your IT department or webmaster to rewrite your page URLs if your website platform is non-accommodating to custom URL nomenclature.

The above eleven-point checklist may not include everything a person could know about SEO, but by simply following this checklist, you'll be miles ahead of the competition and will likely see your posts get significant SEO traffic.