Best SEO Tips – 15 Actionable Tips To Boost Organic Traffic and SEO in 2018 and beyond

In this article, I will be giving you my best SEO tips, 15 actionable SEO tips that still work in 2018 and beyond that will really help you boost your organic traffic

All you have to do is to apply them to your blog or site for a noticeable upturn in your SEO rankings and your traffic.

Word of warning, these SEO Tips are not going to benefit your site unless your site is optimized for mobile.

Google is introducing its mobile-first index meaning that when you search on Google via your desktop you are shown mobile-first results.

So if your site is not optimized for mobile then you are going to see a drop in your SERP’s.

The good news is that the fix is pretty simple.

You have a couple of options to make your site mobile friendly

1. Use a responsive theme so that your site adjusts to the size of the screen it is viewed on
2. Move your site over to AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages

So make sure that your site is mobile friendly.

For more details on Googles Mobile-First index, making your site mobile friendly and Mobile SEO please refer to my article titled – Mobile SEO Guide 2018 – The Ultimate Guide

Here are 15 of the Best SEO Tips for 2018 and beyond

So let’s kick off with my 15 Best SEO Tips.

1/ Add text to graphic (Infographic) based articles

If you are big on Infographics then great we all love good informative images.

The problem is that Google can’t read them unless you describe them and add alternative text and an image title attribute.

If your graphic is, in essence, your article then just describing your graphic won’t be enough for Google.

Always add lots and lots of text underneath your graphics.

Help Google tp fully understand what your image is about so that you get better search rankings on both Google and Google Images.

2/ Add longtail keywords into your title

So for this article, we are looking ideally to rank for “SEO Tips”.

That phrase is quite a tough phrase to rank for so rather than just to optimize the title around “SEO Tips” it would be a better idea to instead optimize for a related long tail keyword phrase that is easier to rank for that incorporates the keywords “SEO Tips” in longtail form so something like “Best SEO Tips” or “Best SEO Tips 2018”

The idea is that you have a much better chance of ranking for the longtail keyword and over time you should see better rankings coming in for the original keyword phrase “SEO Tips” that you really want to rank for because they form part of the title.

3/ Use closely related keywords in your H1 and H2 Title Tags

Your H1 title should always have your main keyword phrase incorporated withing but there often space to get in a related phrase as well. Use a related phrase that forms part of the title, don’t just stuff the second keyword phrase in just to use the space so an example would be “15 actionable SEO tips that work – Best SEO tips 2018”

Also, try to get your main phrase in at least one H2 sub-title and also add in related phrases as well but don’t over optimize.

Remember you are writing for people.

4/ Add social sharing buttons to your site

Social shares equal pretty much instant traffic and shares are a great signal to Google as to how popular your content is.

Don’t give your audience an excuse not to share your content.

Social share buttons are best served at the side of a post and remaining i position when the page is scrolled.

Now, this is great for your desktop version it is not so great for the mobile experience as they can block some of your mobile screen and this will lead to visitors bouncing out of your site.

This is very bad for SEO.

Find a good social sharing plugin that will allow you to add share buttons at the site with an option for them to be removed from your mobile version adding instead share options at the top or bottom or both.

5/ Write long-form content

Long-form content is known to do better within the SERP’s than shorter posts, with post lengths of 1500 to 2000 words being the standard.

Pretty much all my articles now come in at this length if not longer. Some of my guides go over 5000 words when they warrant it.

And writing long-form content leads us to the next tip.

6/ Update short-form content to make it long-form

This just makes sense knowing that long-form content is what Google likes.

Obviously creating long posts of quality takes time.

So just review older posts that are much shorter.

Can you add to them and make them long-form?

In the days where you I am not creating new content, I go back and update old content and just go much longer.

It gives me a chance to refresh it and even add in more related keyword phrases to further covers the search intent of those using Google.

7/ Update the post date

When you update a post, update the post date.

You can edit the publish date under publishing setting on WordPress.

It is also not a bad Idea to add in a line of text within your post stating that your post has been updated to further reinforce to Google that your content is current and relevant.

Posts that are old are often skipped as they are seen as out of date.

You can also lose valuable backlinks as webmasters like to link to the most up to date relevant content.

Don’t give visitors a reason to disregard your content as not up to date

And while you are updating the publish date you can also update your titles as well.

If your article is titled something like “Best SEO Tips 2017” and it is 2018 then make that update to the title.

8/ Open all external links in a new browser

This something that is always overlooked.

We know it is a really good idea for good on-page SEO to link out to related articles and especially to articles that qualify what we write about that are authoritative.

We also know that it is a very good idea to keep out visitors on our pages for as long as possible for better SEO results.

However when we add external links we fail to add HTML to open those links in a new browser. Instead, we just add a straight link that directs away to a different site.

Don’t send visitors away, instead just add target=”_blank” after the link so like this

<a href=”http://SiteName.com/” target=”_blank”>SiteName.com.com</a>

You can test how it works on any of the external links on this post. There is obviously no need to apply this code to internal links

9/ Set up a good internal linking strategy

Good WordPress themes have the functionality to allow you to add related content at the end of any posts you create.

You can also add in a list of recent posts in a sidebar.

These are both good for site navigation but it doesn’t go as far as required to create a good SEO internal liking strategy.

If you are writing content and you have a good related post that you have written, link it to the new content and make it relevant to your current post.

Make it really easy for visitors to find your best-related posts.

Whenever I create a new post I have it in my mind which are the best posts to link to and from.

10/ Consider using the Nofollow attribute to external links

When you link out consider using the Nofollow link tag so that Google discounts and doesn’t follow the link.

The link then remains active for visitors to click through to but it doesn’t instruct Google to pay attention to it.

Don’t add the Nofollow attribute to authority sites or links that qualify what you say because there is a benefit in letting Google seeing that you offer these links as a way to qualify what you are saying.

Instead, use the Nofollow link to homepages or sales pages or products.

Add the Nofollow attribute to links that don’t really add anything to your content.

All internal links within posts, related post links and recent post links should always be Dofollow links.

11/ Embrace Social Media

Social media shows how popular your content is outside of your site and drives traffic to your site.

Social engagement is about as close as it gets to instant traffic.

You have your share buttons in place, use them.

Share to your social channels.

Pay particular attention to Twitter, Pinterest and StumbleUpon.

These 3 social sites are big traffic generators.

12/ Use images to boost your SEO

Google likes rich content and images fall into this category. But remember Google can’t read your images unless you name them and add in the alt description and titles. Also be sure to add keywords in your post text in front of and after your image within your post to help in rank on Google Images.

If you Pin your images to Pinterest then you can add some tags to your hover over text on the image. This description and tags will carry over onto Pinterest making your shares more effective.

13/ Use Numbered Lists to help your chances of making it into The Knowledge Graph

Googles Knowledge Graph is Google’s systematic way of putting facts, people and places together, to create interconnected search results that are more accurate and relevant.

For many step-by-step or “how to do” keywords, Google will sometimes pull your list of items and pop it into the Knowledge Graph.

And you can increase the odds of this happening by numbering the steps in your process (or the items in your list post).

You can also make it into the Knowledge Graph using bullet point lists.

14/ Use Schema Rich Snippets

Schema can hook you up with rich snippets in Google’s search results.

These are the review stars and extra information that you often see in search.

Make sure that you only use structured data that is appropriate to your post.

Don’t attempt to add review stars if your content doesn’t review anything.

15/ Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging is a great way to get yourself and your site known and it is also a great way to build backlinks.

However, Google has gone on record and said that Guest Blogging purely for backlinks is not good for SEO and that if you are doing it stop!

My opinion is that good content is good content regardless of there being a link to your site.

So if done correctly Guest Blogging is an asset to your site.

• Make your content long-form,
• Link to authority sites to qualify
• Use the nofollow attribute if there is more than one link to your site within the post
• Make the content as good as the content on your own site

Thanks for pinning my image 😉

Best SEO Tips 2018 – Takeaways

I have only really scratched the surface when it comes to creating a list of the best SEO tips.

There are clearly way more than 15 SEO Tips that could have gotten a mention but that is where you guys come in.

Do you have any “Best SEO Tips” of your own?

If you do then leave them in the comments section below.

If I like your SEO tip I will update the article and add it to the my list of best SEO tips 😉

Regards Dexter.
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