“SEO is Dead,” “SEO sucks,” and “We’ve never seen the likes of it,” has been regularly sung throughout the blogosphere. You’ve heard it, me too. But is SEO really dead? Not so fast. Professional SEO services are still using some of most effective tactics for content marketing, rankings, social media, paid ads, influencer marketing, and so on. Here are 4 white hat SEO tactics you can try today to better your site’s rankings just in time for the holiday season.
1. Keywords
How exactly should I use keywords? Ah, that’s a question for another day. I can tell you that using your keywords properly will help increase your CTR (aka the number of views) since Google suggests headlines to be your top links by default, and all links are hidden by default, except for links from other websites. And keywords are the foundation of good old fashioned white hat SEO.
Unfortunately, some people get lazy with their keyword placement and use them in the wrong places. For instance, instead of having your brand name in the URL of your website, have it at the end of the address of your website, behind a bit of text that can be replaced with your company slogan or contact information.
2. Guest blogging
I have been a guest blogger for over six years now, and I must say it has been an extremely rewarding experience. It’s also super easy, and there is no reason why everyone can not be a guest blogger. Guest blogging is a technique that involves approaching someone else’s blog and submitting an article on the subject of your expertise. The idea is to get your content published, and if anyone searches for “your niche”, their post will show up. This is another method that needs to be optimized as guest blogging aims to gain links and traffic for your website.
3. Internal linking
The more you spread the link juice around your site, the better for your overall SEO efforts. Advantages can be gained by linking to related content on your site or relevant off-site content. As long as you are linking to relevant/related content, there is no reason not to take advantage of the opportunity to link out whenever possible. It’s also a good idea to avoid linking to the homepage in your inner pages unless it’s essential since search engines tend to give less value to links that point there. From the user experience standpoint, it’s recommended that you link to your main landing page when possible, rather than a homepage.
4. Blog commenting
Blog commenting is one of those things that’s done for many different reasons. Some people think leaving comments can do no harm, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Comments are meant to be a place where you can have a discussion about a subject. This involves both parties communicating with each other, changing their opinions over time-based upon the comments of others.
Most people don’t want to read a blog post or a news article and then leave a comment, and they want to jump online and shout their opinion from the rooftops with no filter. This has been going on for a few years now, and it seems as though blogger feedback has been slowly dying out over time because of it.
