Six Tips for SEO You Probably Haven't Heard Before

Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the Bruce Clay SEOToolSet Training and Certification course in southern California. In addition to riding the Ferris wheel at Santa Monica Pier and strolling down the Walk of Fame, I spent five days learning the ins and outs of SEO from the very best in the business, Bruce Clay himself.
I returned home with a suitcase full of souvenirs and SEO books in tow, ready to apply what I learned. Below are a few simple tips and tricks – in no particular order – that can help you improve the SEO of your site.

1. Consider query intent. When people are searching, they have an objective. Are they researching? Are they shopping? Looking for local results? Know how people use your site and cater your content to it.
2. Be sure to stem. When writing content, be sure to use variants of your keywords. It’s natural in our language and it’s natural in queries. For example, sing = sings = sang = singing. Using only a singular form of a word where it’s natural to use multiple can look spammy and send a red flag to search engines.
3. Don’t overlook blended searches and engagement objects. There are lots of ways to get your site at the top of the page.  Consider engagement objects like video, news, images, and even audio to get your content to show up in blended searches.  Google indexes these items to pull them to the top of page of blended searches when relevant and/or includes them in category specific results like image or video searches.
4. Optimize who you send your press releases to.   Search the news results for your keywords to see who the top publishers for those keywords are and send them your release.
5. Use the strong tag. When you’re scanning a search results page, the engine will bold the words in your query. This draws your eye to it. The same concept applies on your landing page. Bold keywords, especially above the fold, to indicate to the reader that your content is relevant to them.
6. Be “white hat”. I’m sure this goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway – don’t buy links. And don’t sell links. Don’t try to deceive your visitors or the search engines because it won’t work. Google is constantly working to combat black hat SEO and spam. If you practice these techniques, your site will eventually be penalized, and that’s pretty darn hard to recover from. The best way to do SEO well is to do by the books. The extra effort pays definitely pays off.

Thanks for reading my blog post here’s a funny SEO meme for your efforts courtesy of dashburst.com

Feel free to ask me more about what I learned (trust me, I’d love to share!), or learn more about True Media’s SEO capabilities.