There Are No Tricks to SEO

SEO IS NOT TRICKY OR MYSTERIOUS

All of the folks involved with a website should be informed about and have a strategy in mind when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) This makes great sense because proper SEO techniques will help your site appear at the top of the search engine results page. There are many strategies that a person concerned with SEO should utilize, and most of them can be found under the webmaster tools produced by Google and Bing. Additionally, you can find some cool tools to use from ScreamingFrog and SEO Mofo SERP Optimizer.

While all of these legitimate sources provide great information and using them will most likely improve your position on the search engine results pages (SERP) not a single one of them help you with the most important component of your SEO strategy. The answer to what is the best SEO strategy is straightforward yet so frequently overlooked and in some cases dismissed. Employing this strategy is never penalized and always encouraged. It is not easy to follow and requires work, but nothing of value ever comes easy.

WHAT IS THE BEST SEO STRATEGY?

High-quality content is the only sure way to improve, maintain or establish your SERP position. While there are plenty of "agencies" or "freelancers", I call them spammers, that will flood your inbox with claims of an ability to "get your site listed on the first page of Google" or "convert your visitors to sales", etc... the claims are virtually impossible if your site does not contain high-quality content. Using these spammers will most likely result in your site being penalized and possibly removed from the index of the search engine.

WHAT IS QUALITY CONTENT?

This is a funny question, and to most, the answer might be obvious, but quality content is content that contains the words or answers the questions asked by those searching the internet. You need to understand why people would want to visit your site and then develop the content that answers the question: "Why should I visit your website?"

Each and every page single should focus on one topic (keyword). Do not clutter your website with unnecessary pages but you should feel encouraged to develop as many pages as necessary to answer all of the reasons why someone would or should visit your website.

Quality Content is Attractive to Your Target Audience

Put yourself in the place of your target visitor and structure the content of your page to match up with the information being searched for by your target. Develop an overall persona that defines your best customers.

An Example Persona: men and women, aged 30 - 40 years, unemployed, and looking for work.

Appeal To or Answer The Questions Being Asked By Your Customer Persona

After you have set/defined your customers, produce content that answers what is being searched for, and that is appealing to your developed persona. You may even want to hire someone to help you generate content that is appropriate for your site. If you choose to hire a content writer, save yourself the headache and hire someone that is familiar with and void of cultural differences with your customer persona. I cannot tell you how many times a difference in cultural understanding, not a language issue, has been the culprit of unusable content. So, if your company is targeting an American readership/audience, you should hire an American to write your content.

WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE OTHER SEO ARTICLES AND EXPERT OPINIONS ON SEO?

They are all contributions to the body of knowledge surrounding SEO, and the best ones include something about the content. This could be a simple statement such as: develop authoritative content or something slightly more sophisticated and include terms such as canonicalization, backlinks, microdata, etc... and without a doubt, these are strategies that will assist your quest for SEO. But, worry first about producing quality content and once you have amassed 51 individual pages of quality content implementing the other strategies will be somewhat easy.

If you need assistance or would like to discuss this further, please contact me or comment to this post and I will do my best to answer you in an extremely reasonable time frame.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

The number of visitors to your website will be directly related to whether your posts appear to answer questions asked in a search engine's search bar or how well your posts seem to align with the number of people surfing the world wide web.

One way to address those two concepts is to engage in Keyword Research. Keyword research simply means discovering the terms that people search for and incorporating those exact terms into your site content. 

Here is a short course from LinkedIn on Keyword Research.

View the keyword universe from SEO: Keyword Strategy by Matt Bailey