How To’s & TutorialsHow to do SEO in 2017: Full list of guidelines, tips and tricks

Search engine optimization, or as it is popularly called SEO, is a popular strategy for improving website content and applying methods to help it rank higher on common search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Smartly optimized websites with a sharp eye for marketing trends are the ones that get the most organic traffic on the market – these website owners have in fact considered two important SEO trends: they have technically enabled their content to be found on the web, and naturally improved the image of their brand to make it more accessible.

How successful you will be with your own content doesn’t really depend on whether you’ve followed SEO tips and tricks by heart – more often, running a popular blog will depend on how good your content is, and how hard you’re trying to improve users’ experience.

We’ve nevertheless prepared a list of online marketing trends and 2017’s top SEO tips to help you drive more users towards your website:

Start by choosing the main focus keywords

Regardless of whether we like it or not, WordPress’s SEO in 2017 will depend on Google’s computerized algorithms just as much as it did in 2016. What this means is that keywords remain the leading optimization tools, and must be included in your content to ease readers looking for it on Google.

Obviously, you’re not required to be extremely technical but to write with the visitor in mind, paying attention to all of your audience’s interests and needs. Unlike Google, Bing and Yahoo won’t rely on keywords that much and may consider older SEO practices you may already have scratched out as ‘outdated’.

Think of at least one focus keyword for each blog post or page you create, even if that means publishing less content than what you’re used to.

Tools to use and how to use them

There is a specific plugin called Yoast SEO that can help you find perfect keywords for your type of content. Yoast is very popular for analyzing keywords’ density and letting users’ know whether they’ve optimized their content enough. The reported value you should aim for in all cases is 0.5% or more than that.

Look for LSI keywords – Use the plugin to find Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords, namely words collated from the internet that is somehow related to your content.

SEMRush is another great tool for keyword research which can help you defeat competitors, as it uses the seed word to generate multiple alternatives for it. Another important thing SEMRush can do for you is to depict the main keywords used by competitors so that you can analyze their performance, and discover the best options to redirect traffic from theirs to your website.

Use LSI Keywords more – Instead of stuffing your content with all keywords you can think of, try combining the main ones with LSI keywords on all meaningful on-page SEO factors.

SEO Check Up – SEO Check Up is another powerful tool that can help you boost your SEO scores, and fix tips for better SERP ranking.

Search engines will require bloggers to master some additional rules and guidelines so that they can ‘survive’ in their highly competitive ecosystems. The basic rule, nevertheless, remains unchanged: your content should be unique and good enough to preserve the attention of your audience. If you manage to do that, the search engine will find a way to appreciate it.

Using meta keywords

Meta keywords, on the other hand, are no longer a hot topic in the SEO world. Bing and Google’s algorithms no longer need them to rank content, and the only search engine that actually relies on them is Yahoo.

However, bloggers should foremost consider the location where they’re distributing content, as meta keywords are still the core of China’s Baidu and Russia’s Yandex.

Quality over quantity

In any case, we would like to remind you once again that what genuinely matters is the quality of your content. If you must, post things rarely but thoughtfully, and don’t make dramatic length experiments. New sites, nevertheless, need to post more frequently and get backlinks in order to gain traffic and be discovered by the search engine.

Long tail keywords

Long content will also make it possible for the search engine to recognize your long-tail keyword variations, as long as they may be. Many bloggers have no idea that it is exactly long tail variations that bring traffic instead of focus keywords, and can help newly launched blogs excel in their performance.

Social Media

In 2017, there will no longer be an excuse to skip using the benefits of social media, so think about it as soon as your site becomes active. Even if most social backlinks cannot be followed, they provide precious traffic and help websites rate higher on search engines.

Company website? Add a blog to it.

For websites that are not particularly active publishing content day-per-day, we recommend activating an additional blog with 3-5 high-quality posts per week. Crawlers and search engine robots ‘like’ blogs because they help them understand what your website is all about.

Further on, you will be expected to use the right values and proportions on your search text pages, and limit text instances to phrases and words that are genuinely important for your content. Anything other than this may look exaggerated and fake in ‘the eyes’ of search engines.

Don’t go for the looks by crippling functionality

When choosing a designer or an administrator for your website, settle only for such who have adopted SEO considerations. In case you don’t, you may end up with a beautiful new site that can’t be indexed for readers to find it and engage it.

Even websites that are already functional and optimized may lose some of their visibility due to design changes, so make sure the designer knows what he is doing.

Ending thoughts

Last, but not least, make sure you appear on all natural listings and search engine directories by posting your website there. The two most important listings are the one of Google and Bing, but that shouldn’t stop you from researching others.

Whatever tactic you’ve chosen to optimize content, remain patient. Websites take the time to gain traffic and popularity, especially new and local ones people have no idea exist. The average time for boosting traffic with good SEO is three months, assuming that you’ve tried enough to provide valuable content, updated in regularly, and targeted the right audience.

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