Just 5 minutes every day to improve your SEO
SEO isn’t something that has to be incredibly difficult. Sure, there is a lot of time and effort involved. But it’s mostly about performing specific tasks again and again, rather than doing something once and calling it a day.
If you perform the following seven small tasks on a regular basis, it will add up to big rankings gains over the long term for your website.
1. Upgrade and Update Your Older Blog Content
Just because you published a post a year ago doesn’t mean you’re done with it forever. Chances are you’ve learned new things in that time, or new developments in your field have taken place, so you can make that piece of content even more useful.
This is doubly true for content that might not be ranking as high as you think it should.
Spend a little time going through your older content and see where you can expand, or add new resources, to make it even more useful to your readers.
2. Promote Your Content On Social Media
Social media doesn’t have a large influence on your rankings, according to the latest Google ranking factors. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend any time on social media.
Social media helps send traffic to your site. Plus, having a high social share counter will give your posts and your site more authority in the eyes of your visitors. If your post has hundreds of shares across social media your readers are more likely to trust what you’re writing. As a result, they’re more likely to organically share it on their own social media channels and with family and friends, amplifying your reach.
So, spend a little time each day sharing your content and engaging across social media.
3. Improve Your URLs, Titles, and Metas
Having a confusing URL structure isn’t good for SEO. Try to simplify your existing URLs so they’re cleaner, and relevant to your topic, and include keywords (but make sure not to keyword stuff).
Along with this same topic, you’ll also want to improve your titles and meta descriptions. By making your titles more clickable and your meta descriptions more appealing you’ll improve your click-through rate from the search results.
Having a higher organic CTR will actually help to improve your search engine rankings too.
4. Check For Any Broken Links
Having broken links on your site will kill your user experience. If you’ve been running your website for a little while, then you’re probably linking out to resources that are no longer online, or you’ve changed the URL structure of certain posts and pages on your own site.
Both internal links on your site and external links out to authoritative resources are important for SEO and your overall user experience.
You can install the Chrome extension that’s also called Broken Link Checker, which will scan the open page for broken links.
On the topic of links, it’s also important to add relevant internal links within the various blog posts on your site. If you have a piece of content that’s received a lot of links, then add plenty of links to other posts across your site within that post.
5. Perform Blog Email Outreach
Simply writing your content isn’t enough. You also need to spend time promoting that content for shares and backlinks. When sending emails to other influencers in your space it’s important to not send an email that asks for a direct backlink.
Instead, your goal with blog outreach should be to get on the radar of people who are likely to share and link to your content.
If your content is good and you’re getting it in front of the right people, then the links will follow.
6. Spend Time Analyzing Your Competitors
Want a super secret way to create content you know will work? Spend some time analyzing the successes of your competitors.
With tools like Buzzsumo and SEMRush, you can simply type in the URL of your competitors and see which content has been the most popular and which keywords are sending them the most traffic.
- Buzzsumo also has a nifty feature that will show you the people who shared a specific piece of content. Now you can spend time promoting your content to these very same people who are more likely to share.
- SEMRush will also give you backlink data of competitors’ posts, so you can reach out to those very same people when promoting a similar piece of content.
Spending a little time each day researching your competitors will give you endless content ideas while uncovering new opportunities to promote your content.
7. Engage with Big Blogs and Sites in Your Niche
Blog commenting isn’t the best way to build backlinks to your site. But, it does serve a purpose nonetheless. Some blogs do have comments sections that allow you to post your name and link to your website, but the main purpose of commenting isn’t to build backlinks to your site.
Instead, it’s to get on the radar of top bloggers and website owners in your space. When commenting, the best approach is to post something thoughtful that also adds value. Make sure to keep blog commenting best practices in mind.
Commenting, done the right way, can help to open doors. Maybe it’ll lead to a guest post opportunity down the road. Maybe it’ll lead to a linking opportunity. The future of SEO is built upon relationships and regular commenting can help you get there.
Source Hostgator
