Top SEO Tips That Worked For Me

Let me start of by ensuring you that I am no expert on Search Engine Optimization or SEO as they like to call it. I’m just a guy who started blogging and realized I needed to find a way to get more web site traffic. Not really sure how I came to that decision, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t about to pay for search engine optimization consulting. So, here are the things that worked for me.

Use Your Words

If you’ve done any research on SEO, you’ve heard the term “keywords”. Personally, this is one of the words that makes me nauseous because it’s used so much. These are supposed to be the search terms that you want to be ranked in Google for. It helps if you know ahead of time what your SEO strategy is and many search engine optimization companies may be able to handle that for you.

My view on keywords is to use common sense. If you’re writing a post about “Rahsheen’s new song” which happens to be titled “Pickin’ Up The Dog“, you would want to actually mention that in your content. You want to make sure your writing is clear, so you’d be sure to mention the title of the song more than once and you’d probably want to mention who’s song it is a couple of times.

Don’t think about this too hard. Don’t stuff keywords all over the place. Just be natural and focus on writing good content. The keywords should come automatically.

Never Use “Click Here”

Links are very important in SEO. They are what connects the web. The link text is paramount in figuring out the relevance of the site the link points to. For instance, a direct link to the  track mentioned above should use the link text “Pickin’ Up The Dog” or “Rahsheen’s new song”. Makes perfect sense, right? Be sure to use descriptive link text when linking internally (to your own site) and when linking to other sites. Make it a habit. “Click Here” is just a waste of a link.

Make Your Links Promiscuous

Your site means nothing unless people can find it. That’s the whole point of SEO, right? So, you have to get your links everywhere you can. You want other bloggers linking to you. You want your links all over Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Diigo and every other social site (notice I said “every” and not “any”). The trick is to put your link in relevant places.

I’m not sure this would be part of your average search engine optimization services package, but most of the traffic on my site comes from social media, which isn’t the point. The point is that, by networking with others online, I was able to show them my value. In turn, those people shared my content and, in many cases, ended up linking back to my site.

This turned out much longer than I expected, but I hope it was helpful.

What tips have worked for you in generating links to your site and increasing traffic?