The Ultimate Guide: How to Choose SEO Tactics Right?

When it comes to SEO, you can never be sure what is right and what is not, especially when Google and other search engines change their policies so often. It even happens that you are working hard on certain SEO tactics and then realize you’ve been penalized for them in the end. That’s why you should try methods that do not just bring results, but are fully approved by search engines. Fixing the mistakes is painful, so you’d better not do any. Here are a few worthy tips to do SEO right from the very beginning.

1)  Check the guidelines occasionally

If you are involved in SEO marketing, try not to miss any update made by Google or other search engines to their optimization guidelines. They may change keyword density norms, the lengths of meta titles and meta descriptions, H1 tags optimization rules, etc. You need to be aware of all the changes made to the guidelines if you take your SEO job seriously. Playing tricks on Google is a risky business and may cost you your website reputation. Play safe with Google and avoid any black SEO tactics even if you saw other marketers using them and bringing massive traffic to their websites. Sooner or later, any suspicious activity gets penalized.

2) On-site SEO first

Before you start with link-building and other external SEO practices, make sure your website has a good internal optimization. Practically all the major elements need to be optimized for better search engine visibility and streamlined user experience. Optimize titles and descriptions, tags, internal links, etc. Check for broken links and ensure friendly website navigation. This is particularly important for large websites with complex structures (e.g. news websites). Check your website for any broken code by using any of the markup validation services. Compress your images to make sure they load faster. Use .jpg formats instead of .png. Compress videos, presentations, and other multimedia. It will ensure faster loading speed.

3) Regular website updates

Search engines prefer websites that have new portions of content emerging on a regular basis. Choose SEO tactics that are tightly related to your content marketing plan. The best way to add new portions of valuable and informative content to your website is running a blog. Adding posts twice or once a week would be enough for search engines and your visitors. In addition, make regular updates to your website descriptions, enhance them, add new services, provide new images illustrating your products, and create videos showing your team working or product reviews. Publishing video reviews for each product is a good way to have the regular flow of high-quality content on your website. New testimonials and portfolio items will also add trust to your website in the eyes of visitors and search engines.

Speaking of a blog, do not publish only written posts. Create infographics, publish videos and combine them with the text. Embed carefully-selected keywords into your website and into each blog post you publish. Stick to the recommended content length – experts suggest that 2000-2500-word posts work the best for SEO. Write meta titles and meta descriptions for each piece of content you publish. Use consistent keywords for the search engines to rank your content higher. 

4)  Here comes off-site SEO

When your on-site SEO is taken care of, you can start with link building and other off-site SEO tactics. As mentioned earlier, SEO should always be centered around content. Thus, one of the most effective ways to build links is through content marketing. Create an editorial calendar and adhere to it strictly. You need to think about all the suitable places for your external publications. These can be news submission websites, article submission directories, social media. Guest blogging works undeniably well if done right. You choose the websites related to your industry, reach out to their owners and place your content there – this is how it actually works. 

Publications written by CEO's or profound industry experts get more attention and generate more exposure. Various case studies, white papers, and SlideShare presentations tend to generate a lot of traffic coming to your website. Before you employ your content marketing and link-building tactics, think about your in-house skills required for this, as well as those tasks you need to outsource. Create a detailed plan outlining your editorial calendar and frequency of your publications. Promote everything in social media – it is one of the most popular ways to build links to your website.

5) Reduce competition

As writing is going to be the major part of your SEO efforts, you need to choose the topics carefully. Try not to write about things that everyone else writes about. It will be difficult to compete with them. In addition, you will have to choose highly-competitive keywords for them. Write on something specific instead of too general things. Write about the aspects you have the deepest knowledge about. In the same way, choose very specific keywords that have little competition. Just remember that when reaching out to anyone, you reach out to no one. After you choose the main keywords, it is recommended to support them with long-tail keywords. Don’t try to cover everything in your single post – general topics have already been described thousands of times.

6)  Write for Humans

Some unexperienced SEO marketers make their content sound unnatural by optimizing it too much. Irrelevant keywords, their excessive use, machine translation from other languages – visitors will stop reading such content as soon as they notice such things. You have probably read articles that have just been translated from another language and no one bothered to correct at least the most embarrassing mistakes. Personally, I leave such websites right away and so do other visitors. This type of content is not going to do any good to your search engine rankings, so you’d better concentrate on quality instead of quantity. If you write for real people, you will encourage them to comment on your publications, share them and come back for more. This is exactly what search engines will reward you for.

Conclusion

The choice of SEO tactics cannot be an endless process. You need to act, and the sooner you act, the sooner you understand whether they work for you or not. However, remember that black SEO is not the tactic you should experiment with. Today’s SEO is more and more dependent on content – which is why it is sometimes hard to draw the border between what SEO is and what content marketing is. Create your SEO plan and content marketing plan and you will see where they overlap.