5 Often-Forgotten SEO Tips

Are you looking to optimize your SEO? It can be done without having to dig into the metadata. Here are five ways to do so.

Headlines (Ironic, isn’t it?)

Keeping headlines on your site to under 55 characters ensures they will be fully viewable in search engine results pages (SERPs). The more concise, sensational and descriptive the headline, the better. Misleading headlines, however, will certainly affect the site’s SEO negatively, as well as create a whole slew of other problems.

Publish only original content

If a search engine determines that your site includes content that is identical to content on another site—or even on a different page on your own website—that search engine is much less likely to list all occurrences in its results. At best, your site will be competing with other occurrences online. You do not want either of those consequences to be the fate of your site.

Comments

In the age of online trolling, the following tip may seem a bit reckless, but if monitored correctly it can certainly improve your SEO: encourage comments. That’s right. Do not remove the ability for site viewers to engage and comment on your site. By regular site viewers commenting and engaging in dialogue within your site, it becomes much more attractive to SERPs because it implies that viewers find your site valuable enough to engage with.

Our only disclaimer is that you must be vigilant for spam, fake profiles and other illegitimate comments. Remove these from the comment system in your site immediately.

Internal linking

Interconnecting your website by pointing visitors to other relevant pages within your site is a good way to wave down SEOs. Also, if you expected us to make it through this section without inserting our own internal link—say, perhaps, a link to a previous blog about microsites (a great tool in which you might implement these SEO tips, by the way)—you’d be poorly mistaken.

Backlinks, inbound links or incoming links

Backlinks, sometimes referred to as “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are hyperlinks to your website/content strategically placed on others’ websites in a coordinated effort to link back and forth between each other’s content. Backlinks let SEOs know that other credible sites are willing to connect themselves to you, and you to them, proving evidence of your site’s legitimacy and verification.

Requesting that other, reputable sites backlink to your site also opens the door to many other useful marketing benefits through possible relationships with other sites in your industry. You might plan to include a backlink to Site X’s content twice this week if they agree to also backlink to your content twice next week.

Check out our previous posts for more SEO tips where we cover everything from keyword optimization to backlinks and textual conciseness.

Do you ever find you don’t have enough time to optimize your website or microsite or SEO? Are you hoping someone else can write engaging, shareable, SEO-friendly content for your site? The YGS Group has an entire team of creatives ready to help. Just send Executive Vice President Jack Davidson a quick note and we’ll be in touch.