Actionable SEO Tips to Get Massive Traffic to a Website

Before a pilot taking off they perform a vital pre-flight checklist to make sure everything is working. Just like a pilot takes the necessary steps to ensure a flight goes smoothly, it’s in a company’s best interest to create a checklist to make sure everything is perfect so they can have strong SEO (search engine optimization) rankings. Unfortunately, an SEO checklist won’t stop a website or articles from failing, but it can help. It will give posts the opportunity to get noticed and hopefully rank high in Google.

Link to Websites With Relevant Content

Linking to other websites in your content makes you appear as an expert in your field and develops your search engine strategy. To make your site more valuable, Neil Patel recommends regularly linking to other pages.

Linking out to other blogs is critical to growth,

says Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger Media.

To most people, linking out to relevant and authoritative content pages is bad because it takes people off your page.

But, I don’t think so. Link building remains a fundamental part of smart search engine optimization strategy.

According to Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz,

Linking out sends trackable traffic, it makes your site a more valuable and scalable resource.

If you’ve been reading my blogs, you’ll notice that linking out to other sites is my custom. Whenever I write a new post, I reference other trustworthy sites, where appropriate.

You can’t expect to get from others if you’re unwilling to give first. For example, if you’re looking to get inbound links from authoritative blogs, one of the easiest ways to do that is to show your willingness to link out to those blogs from your own content.

Of course, you should only link out to content pages that offer tremendous value. It’s a good SEO practice.

More important, you can notify an influencer when you link out to them, and, if your post is valuable, they can link back to you, share the post or even email it to their huge email subscriber list.

Link building is also all about quality, not quantity. You’ll build more trust in your niche if you have a few authoritative links rather than a dozen poor quality links.

Research the Competition

Have you researched your competition? If you haven’t Entrepreneur recommends taking the time to do that so you’ll have an idea what you want to rank for. Figure out what content will work best for your site and tweak things as needed based on your results later on!

Now that I have a term I want to try to rank for, I'm going to go undercover and do some recon!

Jump over to your “private browsing” mode on your web browser (“Incognito” in Chrome, “Private” in Safari and Firefox, “InPrivate” on Internet Explorer) and head to Google.com. (At my company, we do “private mode” because we don't want Google to use our past search history to influence what we see on the search results page.)

Take a look at all the content on page one of Google, ignoring any ad results at the top. The 10 (or so) results are your competition! What are they missing? Can you do better?

Improve Select Posts

For the posts that aren’t performing as well as you’d like them to, OptinMonster recommends rewriting them and working on improving them. Get them to look incredible to your audience, and they’ll rank high in no time!

Andy Crestodina: Rewrite the posts that almost rank high. There may be lots of them. Look for them in Analytics in the Acquisition » Search Console » Queries report. Set an advanced filter to show just the phases for which the average position (rank) is greater than 10 (on page two). Eureka!

Now give those articles an overhaul. Add details, examples, answers, statistics, images, contributor quotes and anything else that pages it a better piece.

If you go big on quality, you’re very likely to add length and keyphrase usage naturally. Make it a page that you’re so proud of, you want to print it and frame it on the wall.

Here are three ways to make this tactic even more effective:

1. Check all the rankings of the page, so you’re sure not to hurt the relevance for an even better phrase

2. 
   As you rewrite, work in the semantically connected subtopics, which are visible on the search results page in the answer boxes and in the “related searches” at the bottom of the page.
   3. Do this as a regular, quarterly content marketing audit.

Andy Crestodina is a co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, an award-winning 38-person web design company in Chicago.

Write For Your Audience, Not SEO

Another tip that Neil Patel offers is how crucial it is to write for your audience and not solely focus on SEO. A lot of people get so caught up in SEO that they lose sight of the bigger picture, which is to create compelling content that an audience likes to read and learn from.

Lately, I’ve noticed that more and more bloggers and content creators are going back to the old method of SEO, wherein keywords meant to drive search results surpassed the real qualities of engaging, valuable content. If that’s you, it’s absolutely time to change your mindset.

Many people still aren’t capitalizing on long-tail keywords, preferring instead to attempt to manipulate search engines.

That’s the wrong approach.

Don’t prioritize search engines over the actual humans reading your work. Instead, write content for the user, people who have eyes to read and credit cards to purchase your product. Search spiders are just scripts — they don’t buy products, they don’t engage with you on social media, and they won’t become a loyal customer.

Copyblogger is my #1 go-to site, when it comes to putting readers first. No wonder Brian Clark is so successful at content marketing. He’s even turned Copyblogger into a multi-million dollar digital marketing company.

It all happened because a marketer like you was passionate about helping people. That’s what drives me, too — and maybe you, as well.

So, what does it mean to write for users first, before search engines?

Well, it’s simple.

Forget that Google and other search engines exist when you’re writing. Instead, create content that will help someone. This is known as SEO copywriting.

Funny enough, when you put users first, you’ll actually write helpful content that search engines will reward, because search engines follow users. It’s not the other way round. At the same time, you’ll be enhancing the user experience and building trust with your audience.

Reach Out to Those Who Have a Link to Your Website

Part of SEO is researching who has linked to your blog posts or web pages and making sure the link is accurate. Once you manage to find websites that have mentioned your brand, Matthew Barby recommends reaching out to the subscriber asking them for a link to their webpage so you can return the favor.

If you manage to get an email address from the website, you'll want to get in touch with them as soon as possible to add a link to their webpage. I've found that the nearer you do this to the date it was published, the higher the conversion rate.

Here's an example email template that you can use:

Hi {{FirstName}},

First of all, I'd like to thank you for mentioning {{Your Brand or Product Name}} within your recent article. It means a lot!

I noticed within the article that you didn't actually link through to our website when you mentioned us. Is there any chance that you can quickly update the post with a link? Here's the link to save you time searching for it: {{Link to Your HomePage or Product Page}}

Thanks in advance, and if you ever need any more info on {{Your Brand or Product Name}} then I'd be happy to supply you with it (imagery, video content, etc.).

Thanks again!

{{Your Signature}}

SEO Tips to Try Right Now

Search Engine Journal provides a bunch of quick and actional tips you can apply right now, and here are just a few to implement on your website right away:

Do not use “#” in URLs. Googlebot does not support index URLs with “#” listed.

With the new mobile-first index, use Google Search Console’s Fetch and Render tool to test how Google’s mobile search agent views your mobile pages vs. your desktop pages.

Do not use AJAX-Crawling scheme on new websites. Migrate any sites that are currently using AJAX-Crawling. Remember: remove “meta fragment.”

If you’re donating to charities and nonprofits for a backlink, this is against Google’s webmaster guidelines.

While your sitemaps are limited to 50,000 URLs per Sitemap, you now have the ability to have a compressed version of 50MB, compared to the previous 10 MB.

Sources: Neil Patel, Entrepreneur, OptinMonster, Matthew Barby, Search Engine Journal