Succeed in diy seo by providing useful content by ericwelke

Articles from EricWelke.com Succeed in DIY SEO by Providing Useful Content by Eric Welke

If you’ve set up your own website or blog you’ll be familiar with the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, it means fine-tuning your website and building up its presence online so that it ranks high on the search engine results for your chosen keywords. The desired result of ranking high is to drive interested users to your site. These are users who would want to read and interact with your website or blog. They are interested in the subject matter or product you’re discussing. They are potential customers for products you’re selling or for the companies who have put ads on your page. This is how most “for-profit” websites earn their keep.

It used to be that you could rely on only one strategy to get the visitor numbers up, but after several updates by Google, we’ve learned that we need to diversify our efforts and not just rely on back links, article submissions and directory listings. Social network mentions and shares are also playing a bigger part in getting your site to rank.

Natural is better.

This holds true for even for SEO. In an ideal world, websites can all be easily indexed by search engines and ranked based on their relevance to users. In reality we all need to consistently ensure that we do the following:

Assign a primary keyword for our article – this is the word or phrase we want to rank for Keyword phrases should be present in the page title, meta description, meta keywords, H1 and Alt text. Keyword phrases should appear on the 1st and last sentences of our article. Use our primary keywords at least once every 100 to 150 words (mention it too much and we risk getting penalized for it)

Once we’ve taken cared off the on page factors, we should then focus on the most important part: useful content.

When we write a post or article on our blog or website, it should be on something that we are knowledgeable on. We should never underestimate our readers, especially the first time visitors to our site. If we know we’re putting up quality content then we should be confident that it will attract people to our site – users who just skim and skip aren’t really people we can engage with.

Our niche should be something we are comfortable writing about and our articles should be geared towards the audience we want to cultivate. Simply put, if we write for beginners then we should use entry level topics and language. As time passes, we can then start on more advanced topics and we can refer people to our earlier articles. This internal link to our old articles also helps to improve the older article’s relevance and ranking, but again we need to be reasonably moderate about internal links. 1 or 2 should suffice.

Posting regularly is important. It keeps your audience checking your site on a regular basis. Try to set a schedule for putting up new content. Imagine your blog as a pet you need to feed. It won’t die out if you missed your schedule but it will certainly affect your momentum in the long run. This may sound simple but it becomes harder to write once you’ve exhausted your own store of knowledge and experience.

Enable bookmarking and social sharing on your post. This is a bit on the technical side but to make sure your site’s reach can expand, give your readers all the tools they need to share your content. Embed buttons for Likes, Retweets, +1s and

Pinterest at the very least. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go overboard like some sites tend to do and put a platoon of buttons on the bottom of your page. This is unsightly and adds to the loading time. SEO results are now more heavily influenced by social factors. It not just about keyword relevance and back links now. Social sharing also counts so make your content is worthy of sharing.

Quality content is the key to stable ranking results because:

Provides a benefit to people who read your work which in turn increases the likelihood that it will be shared on a forum, a social network feed or referred to in other blogs / websites. Mentions drive interest and interest drives useful traffic to your site. In time, consistently good content gives you credibility and, providing all on page SEO factors are consistently met, give you a high rank on search engine results. A slow and natural / organic rate of improvement in ranking factors produces results that last.

DIY SEO isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t about special techniques. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about doing what you need to do to make your site easy to index, interesting to read and easily shareable.