Is there really such as a thing as an SEO secret these days?
Possibly not, but there are a few white hat practices that bloggers tend to overlook.
Blogging is all about sharing your knowledge, but it’s also a great way to drive traffic to your website and raise your online profile.
The tactics I’m going to outline in this article are pretty basic, which is why they usually get forgotten about. However, each one with help you make marginal gains that all add up to a big difference.
Headlines
Your headline is crucial.
Not only will it get your post noticed, it will also determine whether it gets read or not.
Did know you know that the more click throughs your article gets in the search results, the higher you’re likely to rank? It’s true, because Google’s algorithm will attach more value to your blog because of the post’s popularity.
Conversely though, if you already rank fairly well, but your headlines are poor having a knock on effect on your click through rates, your blog will be seen as being irrelevant to that search term and your rankings could fall.
That’s why it’s best to always write cracking, eye-catching headlines.
Images
Images give you diversity in your backlinks.
The Alt tag tell the search engines about the image, but if you use an image to link to your blog post, that tag will also serve as a keyword.
A great way to boost this effect is to create infographics for others to use – just ask for an image backlink to your post.
Nofollow or Dofollow?
It’s tempting to take a few short cuts when it comes to link building, especially when a growing number of sites only offer nofollow links. If you’re tempted to buy in links, don’t. That’s is the quickest way to ruin your rankings and reputation.
Concentrate on creating high quality articles that other sites will want to link to.
Linking out
Yes, linking out to other high quality blogs is a good thing.
If you are seen as a trusted blog, it’s expected that you’ll be linking to other equally high quality blogs.
Length of blog post
It’s best to stick with longer, high quality, informative blog posts. However, you also need to work on gathering comments because this will add to the length of the unique content for each post – something the search engines love.
None of these are revolutionary, but they will all help you in your quest for a high ranking blog.
If you have any other suggestions I’ve overlooked, leave a comment below.
2 comments ↓
Great article, I don’t think there are any secrets anymore as such. The knowledge is all online, I think it is just buried in so much noise. If there is a secret, I would say that it is to keep things simple and vary your content, try and incorporate video, audio, infographics as well as written content….
Thanks
Tony
Great input Tony, thanks.
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