Important SEO tips to improve website traffic in 2016

SEO is still the most crucial factor in determining a website’s success. It is an inevitable process in increasing website traffic, boosting the page rank and ultimately in bringing more sales. So we would like to present you a must-follow SEO checklist for 2016. We hope it will help you improve your visibility and catalyse your online promotion. No matter whether you are going to optimize a new website or improve the traffic and search engine rankings of an existing website, this will help you get the best result.

What are the key metrics you need to measure?

Here are the most important metrics you need to measure on regular basis to understand the effectiveness of your SEO campaign:
Total Unique Visitors (The number of users)
Lead Conversion rate (The number of leads per total users)
Customer Conversion rate (The number of customers per total leads)

It might seem a little strange for people who are used to conventional SEO checklist. The ultimate goal of SEO is not bringing more visits or improving the PageRank but generating more sales at the end. You have to create a spreadsheet to help you calculate these metrics on a monthly basis. Keeping data intact is essential to win the objectives of an SEO campaign.

How to find your keywords?

Before you go for conventional keyword research, you need to develop your buyer personas. That means you have to find out who your ideal buyers are. You have to identify their needs and hurdles, and how you can help those customers to solve them. This is the most important phase in SEO. If you fail to identify your ideal client and develop the customer persona, you can’t create content that can attract your customers. Therefore, it has to be done first. The free buyer persona template provided by Hubspot will be useful for you to get started. Once you finish it and get an understanding on what your potential customers are searching for, you can start finding out the Keywords.

For this purpose you can use automated keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner and also the suggested searches appearing while you enter keywords or phrases in Google search box. First you make a general list of maximum keywords and then narrow it down by removing highly competitive keywords to avoid tough competition that is too difficult to win. After sieving out irrelevant keywords, make a list of potential keywords which has more probability of getting higher rank for your website. Those keywords will be the core of the content you have to create and spread.

How to create content for SEO?

Before start developing content using the selected keywords, you need to create an editorial calendar. Check this in-depth article on creating editorial calendar using Google Calendar by Corey Eridon. This will help you do content marketing in an effective organized manner. The next problem is finding topic for the content. This can be overcome by using Google Trends. It will help you stay with the trend and find new ideas for generating content. When creating content, you should be careful of writing attractive headlines that will persuade your target audience to go through it. Hubspot’s blog topic generator is an extremely useful tool to accomplish it. Restricting content to blog articles only is not a good idea. Instead try to make a variety of content including infographics, videos, ppts, lists, guides, tutorials, and so on.

The next step is spreading this content on web. For that you need to promote it through Social Media and other content syndicating platforms. You can also use content syndication partners like Outbrain and Taboola. You have to make sure that the content you are generating is optimized with the keywords you have already listed.

Checklist for On-Page SEO 2016
This section covers various factors you need to take care of while doing on-page SEO.

1. Title tags: Well written title tags is an essential ingredient of on-site SEO. Select right keywords from the list and use it judiciously. The length of title tag should not exceed 60 characters. Include the company name also to enhance the branding.

2. Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are also highly helpful. You need to write short description about a page that will help users know what it’s about. The optimum length is 155 characters. You have to use keywords in a catchy way so that users will be tempted to click. ‘Call to action’ can be effectively used in a meta description.

3. Permalink Structure: In the URL of the page, use keywords and phrases so that it will enhance the SEO quality of the page.

4. Headings: Heading tags help search engine to understand what the web pages are about. Make sure that the use of H1 tag is mandatory. You can use H2 and H3 tags only if it will fit perfectly.

5. Images: Add alt tags with keywords on images. Name images with keywords before you upload it.

6. Content: Don’t use fluffy content. Say things in a straight, simple manner. Add keywords wisely and ensure that readers should not be disturbed with the overuse of keywords. Quality is more important than the size of the content.

7. Avoid Repetition: Do not overuse keywords. Instead, use different keywords and synonyms of keywords to avoid the repetition. Otherwise, Google will blacklist the page for over optimization.

8. Website Structure: Site navigation is a crucial factor in SEO. A user should be able to go to a page within 3 clicks from the home page. If not, you need to rearrange your site structure and navigation.

9. Internal linking: You can direct to users from one of your pages to others using internal linking. This will help improve traffic within your website. To know more about internal linking, take a look at this article published in Kissmetrics.

10. External Linking: Give external link from your web page when you refer content from another web page. It will increase the relevancy and reflect while search engines index the page.

Off-Page Optimization for 2016

11. Competitive backlink analysis: It’s good to make competitor analysis to get an idea on from where they are getting backlinks. Moz’s competitive link analysis is a useful guide.

12. Make a worksheet for backlink possibilities: Create a worksheet and list all of your competitors’ sources of backlinks along with additional link opportunities you have figured out yourselves.

13. Develop outreach emails: You can create an email to be sent to authors and webmasters to request their assistance to get backlinks. This will help you link with websites which are given high relevancy by search engines.

14. Get in touch with influential people: Identify influencers on web who are related to your industry. Try to build healthy relations with them and augment your brand awareness and reach using their network.

15. Link non linked content: Find contents about you and your business which are not linked to your website. Try to get it linked to your website, related blog or page.

16. Engage in discussions: Participating in discussions is a good strategy to get backlinks to your website or blog. It will also help improve your credibility as a business owner. Mention your website or blog article wherever it is possible in a discussion.

17. Disavow damaging links: You need to disavow links that will negatively affect your Page Rankings Go through this post written by Neil Patel about the Google Disavow Tool.

18. Relevancy of backlinks: Always ensure that your backlinks are linked to relevant content which are fresh and useful to users. If the backlink is outdated, you can approach the authors and request them to add a new link instead.

These are the basic things you should take care while doing off-page SEO. Backlinking is a tiresome task. However, you need to try hard since it is very crucial in improving your rankings.

19. Building Social Media Presence

This is an inevitable part in any SEO campaign. Social media can help you a lot in optimizing your website. You need to identify ideal social media channels to reach your potential customers. Then create content that are apt to get propagated in those channels. You have monitor your social media promotional activities strictly. You can use social monitoring tools for this purpose. Organize all your social media activities by setting up a calendar. Get in touch with influential people and companies in your vertical and use such relationships to amplify your reach. Create lovable contents that will be useful to your customers. If you do it consistently, people will turn into your followers and ultimately become your customers.

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