That’s why you need to know the on-page, technical, and off-page elements that influence how your content will perform in the search results—plus the best practices you need to follow. Doing this will help you avoid publishing content that doesn’t help you achieve your business objectives.

Here is a guide on WordPress SEO best practices to help you avoid making mistakes that will affect your website’s performance and improve the likelihood of high-ranking content.

Why Use WordPress Over Other CMS Tools?

Even with other CMS solutions available, WordPress is still the most popular CMS tool. There’s nothing simpler than navigating the WordPress dashboard and block editor that comes default with the platform.

Founded in 2003, it has won numerous awards, including “Best Open Source Software”, and powers most of the world’s websites. In fact, it powers around 43% of all websites.

What makes WordPress the go-to option for most website owners? Its flexibility. WordPress allows you to customize your website to fit your exact needs, including adding SSL, meta description, alt text, sitemap, breadcrumbs, and even schema markup – everything you need to optimize for the SERP.

For example, from a user experience perspective, you can buy WordPress themes that you can customize to align with your brand strategy and deliver content dynamically to different devices. Your web visitors will have a smooth browsing experience as they interact with your content because they can easily find what they’re looking for.

From an SEO perspective, WordPress allows you to use different plugins to optimize your content and improve website performance. Popular SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, RankMath, and Meta Sync SEO are perfect for content optimization. You can also add an analytic SEO plugin such as Google Analytics or Bing Webmaster Tools.

WordPress SEO Best Practices

WordPress allows you to manage all your content in one place easily. Optimizing your WordPress site increases the chances of driving more organic traffic to your website and achieving your SEO strategy objectives.

While we could publish a WordPress SEO guide article about basic SEO practices such as using the Yoast SEO plugin, connecting Google Analytics, using a focus keyword, or writing a meta description, we’ll focus more on the concepts of WordPress SEO you should focus on to perform better on the search engine.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

1. Create and Publish Content that Satisfies User Intent

Since content is the vehicle you’re using to achieve your business objectives, it needs to be relevant to what your potential buyers are looking for in the search results.

Your readers might land on your blog post at any stage of their buying journey, which means you’ll need to stand out by providing the answers they need when they enter the search query. Then, point them to the solutions they’re looking for.

You could start this process by performing keyword research. SEO tools such as Google Search Console, Semrush provide SEO expert information to help find a specific keyphrase to focus on.

Publishing content that satisfies your reader’s intent requires you to start with the end in mind. This means creating a content strategy that helps you clarify your objectives and identify your ideal readers.

For example, let’s say your ideal readers are furniture vendors. A furniture vendor has two challenges when running their business: acquiring more customers and managing their product information. Suppose you are trying to sell a product information solution. In that case, content for this furniture vendor audience needs to teach how to solve their initial challenge (customer acquisition) before introducing a solution to their second challenge (managing product information).

This approach makes your content relevant and helpful, which is exactly what Plytix, a product information management tool, has done.

Their content helps the reader tackle both challenges by creating a furniture marketing strategy and then introducing their product with a specific page to navigate at the end of their post. As they get more customers, they’ll need to manage their product information better. Hence, their content ensures that the business owner knows what solutions to look for when they want to manage their product information effectively.

2. Make Your Content Accessible

In addition to making your content relevant and helpful, you must ensure that it’s easily accessible to both search engines and website visitors. Making your content accessible includes creating and submitting an XML sitemap to Google in Google Search Console so that its bots can crawl and index your content to ensure that it appears in search results.

Your HTML sitemap also needs to make site navigation easier so that your web visitors can find the information they’re looking for on your WordPress website. When using a WordPress sitemap, your content appears in a user-friendly format so readers won’t have trouble finding their way around your content.

You can use the SearchAtlas Site Auditor to ensure that there are no technical issues with your sitemap.

In addition, you also need to write a descriptive SEO title telling a potential reader what the web page is about. When writing descriptive page titles, be clear and direct. If your reader doesn’t understand what your page is about, they won’t click through to read your content. Instead, explain how readers will benefit from your content once they click on your meta title.

Your readers are intelligent, and making it easier for them to find what they need is a cornerstone of content accessibility. Use header tags that break down different sections of your content to help the reader self-select what sections to read and what to skim.

For accessibility, it’s also important to add alt text to your images. The alt tag not only helps visitors using screen readers, it’s also a ranking factor for image SEO.

One other aspect of accessibility is ensuring your SSL is up to date. This is important for both the search engine and potential visitors to trust your WordPress site. Luckily, it is pretty easy to generate a free SSL certificate from many major hosting platforms.

3. Use User-Friendly URL Structures

The URL structure of a webpage is easy to overlook, especially if you haven’t changed your permalink settings inside WordPress to have a custom URL structure for your content.

In addition to making your site crawlable, reader-friendly URL structures improve user experience. They do this by telling readers what the page behind the URL is about. This makes it easier to decide whether it is relevant to them or not.

When creating your permalink structure, narrow it down to your primary keyword. Then, get rid of any other information that makes it longer than it needs to be. This includes numbers and symbols.

You can also add keyword modifiers to your URL to align it with the searcher’s intent. Modifiers can be based on niche, location, or topic. For example, if your primary keyword is “local SEO,” modifiers might include: “how to,” “real estate,” or “New York SEO.”

These modifiers will appear in your title tags, so you’ll need to include them in your URL. This way, you’ll match with specific searches that readers will run when looking for information related to your primary keyword.

Lastly, ensure this final permalink is set as your canonical URL, which you can do in Yoast SEO or AIOSEO. Otherwise, the crawler might not be able to distinguish duplicate content. Properly mapping redirects and schema markup will also help avoid this duplicate content issue.

4. Add Internal Links

As you publish more content, you’ll need to create more internal links to relevant pieces of content. This means internal linking is another task you need to cross off your to-do list before you publish your post. Internal and external links are important in SEO for passing page rank, or “link juice” to relevant pages. These backlinks also tell the search engine where important pillars and trusted sources are.

We have three types of internal links: navigational, in-text, and sidebar links.

• Navigational links help your visitors move from one place to another on your website.
• In-text links help readers access similar topics within your content.
• Sidebar links help users access related content.

When publishing a blog post, you need to focus on in-text links to improve the chances of ranking on Google. If you have a huge library of content, use a WordPress SEO plugin such as Rank Math or Link Whisper to help identify relevant content to link to.

If you’re just getting started, create a content structure and choose topics that align with this structure. In addition, make sure you use relevant anchor text for your internal links. This makes it clear to both readers and search engine crawlers what the content on the next page is about.

5. Optimize your Site for Mobile

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Your web visitors access your site from different devices. More than 58.9% of traffic is attributed to mobile users, so there’s a high likelihood that one of your web visitors will access your site using a mobile device.

Mobile users expect to navigate the site smoothly, find the content they need, and take the actions they need to take.

For this to happen, your website needs a fast page speed and render properly on a mobile device.  Use WordPress themes that dynamically deliver content across different devices. Also, avoid full-screen pop-ups that decrease your site speed and prevent mobile web visitors from accessing your content.

We suggest you turn on the Google Accelerated Mobile pages plugin in WordPress and test using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Are WordPress Plugins Good for SEO?

Being an open-source software, WordPress offers a plugin library to expand and improve different use cases related to search engine optimization, website performance, and security. For example, you can choose an all-in-one plugin such as AIOSEO or Yoast SEO plugin, a cache plugin and an SSL plugin (to add an SSL certificate to your WordPress site.

However, due to the huge number of plugins, you need to ensure the plugin you choose meets your needs without compromising on website performance, security, or the functionality of other plugins you’re using.

When choosing the best plugin, get it from the list of plugins on WordPress.org. Read through user reviews to learn about the experiences other users had and also make sure that the plugin provider provides support for their customers.

Once you buy your plugin (or decide on a free plugin) and install it, monitor it to see if it negatively impacts website performance and address any emerging issues.

Use WordPress SEO to Boost your Content Rankings

Done right, WordPress SEO will move you closer to your content and SEO objectives. It’ll ensure your content shows up in search results for your readers.

It also helps you stand out among your competitors. If your content keeps showing up in the top search results, then readers know the solutions you provide must be what they need.

You’ll need to publish content that satisfies reader intent, make it accessible, create user-friendly URLs, optimize your site for mobile devices, and internally link your content to relevant content that readers need.

Along the way, you’ll need plugins to make your work easier. If you’re unsure which SEO plugin to start with, consider scaling your SEO campaign with Linkgraph’s SEO Content Assistant to help you implement the best practices we’ve covered.

About the Author:

Alex Birkett is the co-founder of Omniscient Digital, a premium content marketing & SEO agency. He lives in Austin, Texas with his dog Biscuit and writes at alexbirkett.com.

The post WordPress SEO Best Practices: 5 Tips for More Organic Traffic appeared first on LinkGraph.

But people hate ads. And 93% of online experiences start with an organic search. That means most people run to Google to help find what they are looking for. And let’s face it, they aren’t clicking on the ads.If you aren’t ranking at the top of those organic searches, you’re missing out on a big piece of the pie that could help grow your business.

In this guide, we’ll share six SEO strategy tips to drive business growth in 2023 and beyond.

Let’s dive in.

1. Enhance Website Speed and Usability

Before focusing on the nitty gritty of creating content and building links, it’s crucial to make sure your website is fast and easy to use.

After all, what’s the point of spending money, time, and energy on driving visitors to your website if it can’t handle the traffic you are generating? Or worse, providing a horrible experience that causes visitors to bounce immediately and lose trust in your brand?

When it comes down to it, if your site is slow to load, your visitors will leave your page in search of a faster answer. This action sends a negative signal to search engines, which can seriously impact rankings. Further, if your site has poor usability, like hard-to-navigate menus, or doesn’t scale properly on mobile devices, you guessed it, another negative signal.

Your website should load in three seconds or less on any given device. That’s the sweet spot.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to test the current speed of your page. If your page is slow too load, Google will offer helpful suggestions to improve the performance.

For usability, focus on adding a search box to your website, so it’s easy for users to find what they are looking for. You can also create collapsible menus for display on mobile devices to clean up the look and feel of your site.

2. Zero in on Keyword Research

If you build it, they’ll come. Right?

Wrong. The internet is a black hole of information. And once you hit publish on your blog post, it enters into the deep abyss.

So how do you get your content to see the light of day? It all comes down to choosing the right keywords. What are users really searching for? That’s where you need to focus your attention.

Finding proper keywords that both relate to your product or service and align with what your audience is searching for is the bread and butter of a successful SEO strategy.

Take Nlyte, a company focusing on data management and infrastructure solutions, as an example. They do an excellent job creating simple FAQ pages that target competitive keywords such as “colocation data center” or “data center infrastructure” to provide value for the audience searching for more information about these terms.

Let’s look at some numbers to drive this concept home. One targeted keyword generates almost $10,000 worth of traffic value to their website.

What does that mean? $10,000 is the estimated monthly cost it’d take to generate the same amount of traffic using a paid search for that single keyword.

The takeaway? Writing helpful content around the proper keywords that resonate with your target audience is a surefire way to boost organic traffic for a fraction of the price of paid ads. It’s a no-brainer.

Use a Keyword Research Tool

Thankfully, there are plenty of SEO tools like SearchAtlas that help you streamline keyword research and identify high search volumes. But you don’t always want to target the most competitive keywords.

The secret sauce is finding the less competitive long-tail keywords that still have decent search volume. For example, the generic keyword “garden tools” has a keyword difficulty of 45 with 61,000 monthly searches, according to SearchAtlas. The more specific keyword “garden tools names” has a much lower keyword difficulty of 10 with 4,000 monthly searches.

Of course, the monthly search volume is much lower for “garden tools names,” but you’ll have an easier time ranking for this keyword and can quickly drive traffic to your site.

Rinse and repeat this process and watch the organic traffic come flooding in.

3. Align Content with Buyer’s Journey

Now that you have followed my SEO strategy tip of choosing fresh, hot keywords, it’s time to pump out the content.

As we mentioned, you can’t just build a few pages and expect to drive 100,000 qualified leads to your website every month.

People must be able to discover your website by searching for relevant keywords across all of the stages of their buying journey. To make that happen, you must publish high-quality content with relevant keywords for each step of the journey.

Suppose you are a fintech startup that provides a debit card for teens. You want your brand to appear as the first result in Google when parents start the search for banking options for their kids and also when teenagers decide to sign up for a debit card.

Here are some examples of content that you could publish to align with each stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness: A research report on how teenagers spend their money
• Consideration: An expert guide about the pros and cons of debit cards for teens
• Decision: A comparison post about your teen debit card features vs. those of your main competitor

Create and publish 5–10 pieces of high-quality content each month for the best results. If this doesn’t sound possible, try using a blog idea generator or other AI-based writing tools to help speed up the process.

Note that AI tools aren’t meant to replace writers completely. They do, however, speed up your workflows, help pull in topical relevance, and allow you to focus time on other critical growth areas.

4. Differentiate your Content in Search Results

Over 2.5 billion blog posts are published every year. And everyone is trying to land a spot on the first page of Google.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to differentiate your content in search results to drive better results.

If everyone is writing posts about the “XX Best Dining Tables,” simply creating another “XX Best Dining Tables” piece won’t help you stand out or rank well in search results.

Creating a rehashed version of what already exists is no longer the best way forward. Instead, focus on the topic vs. angle approach.

In this case, the topic is dining tables. The angle is the differentiator that helps you stand out from the crowd, rank higher on search engine results pages, and drive higher click-through rates.

Find a unique angle that puts you on the radar and encourages clicks:

• 2023 product comparison
• Beginner’s guide on how to choose the right dining table for your home
• Compare genuine customer reviews
• Interview interior design experts and rank the top dining tables based on your data

The key is to avoid restating what already exists online by adding new value to the topic from a different angle.

5. Prioritize On-Page SEO

Once you have content ready for publishing, you can start thinking about on-page factors that’ll play a contributing factor.

These include the URL, the title of your post or page, the meta description (a blurb describing what a page is about that appears under the link in search results), and image alt text.

On-page optimization can help search engine crawlers better understand your content and enhance the user experience. When people spend more time on your site, it increases their chances of converting into a customer.

URL String

Make sure to include your long-tail keyword in the URL string. For example, if you are writing a post about “what is a virtual receptionist” your URL should look like this: 

Keywords

When you write the introduction of your content, try to use the keyword you are targeting naturally. This will help search engines understand your article and reassure readers that they clicked on the correct link.

You can also use an optimization tool like the SEO Content Assistant. These tools are easy to use and can help improve the quality and relevance of your content for a given keyword and maximize the impact.

Image Alt Text

Adding alt text to your images is an easy way to tell search engines and screen readers more information. If you don’t include them, your images may not be crawled or understood by search engines.

Use simple phrases that describe the picture. Also, don’t stuff keywords in your alt text.

Internal Links

Internal links help search engines identify and organize your site’s content, connect related pages, and spread link authority.

External links can provide you with authority and credibility. Internal links help you distribute that authority across your site and create an interconnected web of content. They also give users helpful information and let search engines know how your web pages are connected.

Follow these simple steps for a results-driven internal linking strategy:

1. Scour pages on your site with quality backlinks (the most link juice) and create an internal link back to lower authority pages with relevance.
2. Focus on building internal links to pillar posts and hub pages.
3. Make sure all links are only three clicks away from the homepage.

Internal links are the workhorses that ensure that your site stays organized. Without proper internal links, Google has difficulty figuring out what page goes with what keyword and what pages on your website are related.

6. Invest in Link Building and Digital PR

Link building is a crucial component of ranking well on search engines. Links from other websites (external links) can signal to Google that your content is trustworthy and helpful to readers.

For example, as a travel startup, getting a mention from Travel and Leisure’s blog would be a reason to celebrate. But why?

Travel and Leisure is:

• A company that’s highly relevant to the travel industry
• The website has a high authority (recognizable brand that’s been around for a long time with lots of content and links )

When you gain an external link from sources like these, the site’s authority gets passed back to you.

With a few high-quality links from reputable sources, you can start to move the needle and improve your organic rankings. But it’s easier said than done, from guest posting to conducting studies or writing yearly reports to helping a reporter out (HARO).

All these tactics are tedious and time-consuming. If you don’t think you have the time or resources to pull this off, consider investing in link building services that can speed up the process and guarantee results. You won’t regret it.

Conclusion

Building a solid SEO strategy isn’t difficult, but it’s not easy either.

It requires maximum effort, consistent content creation, and ongoing tweaks.

But if you want to succeed online, don’t wait to follow these SEO strategy tips. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to rank and the longer it’ll take to see results. And you are opening the door for competitors to gain an advantage.

Start by familiarizing yourself with what your ideal customers are searching for and how to add value to their buyer’s journey. And then create, optimize, and distribute that content to improve your rankings.

And finally, this is your sign to invest in targeted PR and link building efforts so you can sit back, relax and watch the traffic on your site continue to climb.

About the Author: Guillaume is a digital marketer focused on handling the outreach strategy at uSERP and content management at Wordable. Outside of work, he enjoys his expat life in sunny Mexico, reading books, wandering around and catching the latest shows on TV.

The post 6 SEO Strategy Tips For Better Rankings in 2023 appeared first on LinkGraph.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing web content to rank in search engines. The on-page SEO process encompasses keyword research, SEO copywriting, meta tag optimization, page experience, and more.

Site owners who implement on-page SEO across their web pages will likely see more keyword rankings and higher ranking positions for valuable keywords in their industry.

What’s Different about On-Page SEO in 2022 compared to 2021?

Although the best practices of on-page SEO for the most part remain the same, search engine technology grows more advanced every year, changing the way we execute optimization across our web pages.

For 2022, there are some key updates that site owners should be aware of so they can leverage them to achieve higher rankings and organic traffic.

Here are some of the top SEO trends for 2022:

• People also ask: A recent study showed that Google’s “People also ask,” feature now shows up for approximately 48.6% of all searches, and often above position 1.
• Core Web Vitals: Since the Page Experience update, Core Web Vitals are officially a Google ranking factor. Fast-loading, responsive web pages now perform better in the SERPs
• AI Copy Generation: More SEO software engineers are incorporating GPT-3 into their tools and applications to help content marketers create SEO content more quickly and at scale.
• Keyword Clusters: It’s estimated that Google processes over 63,000 keyword searches a second. There are hundreds to thousands of ways that users are searching, and keyword clustering is a more effective strategy for getting a web page to rank for all of those variations.

The Best On-Page SEO Tips for 2022

For 2022, on-page SEO is all about combining SEO best practices with newer strategies that help your web pages meet the quality signals Google crawlers are looking for.

1. Make Core Web Vitals Top Priority

Last summer, Google rolled out one of the largest algorithm updates in years — the Page Experience Update. In addition to security, mobile-usability, and page speed, Google considers a web page’s Core Web Vitals when ranking content.

Although load times and speed have not traditionally been viewed as “on-page seo” priorities, the reality is, a web page with high-quality content doesn’t mean much if it takes too long to load or items shift while the user scrolls or clicks.

Optimizing Core Web Vitals should now be a part of your fundamental SEO practice. To get a better understanding of where your web pages stand, use the Site Auditor tool in GSC Insights, or run your pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool

2. Answer Common Questions

A recent study of 2.5 million search queries showed that Google’s “People also ask” feature now shows up for about 48.6% of searches. 

With its prominent placement at the top of the SERP results (and often above position 1), getting your content ranking in this coveted feature is the next great way to improve site visibility and generate organic clicks.

To get there, your writing team needs to provide answers to common questions in your content. Utilize questions in your h2s-h6s, and make sure your answers are detailed and comprehensive.

By providing answers to those questions on the page, your content can show up at the top of page one, even if your traditional SERP result appears lower on the page (or even sometimes on page 2)! 

Watch this tutorial on how to optimize for People also ask using the SEO Content Assistant.

3. Use Content Optimization Software

With more advanced natural language processing technology, Google is not just looking for your target keywords on the page anymore.

Crawlers are looking for related terms, subtopics, synonyms, and other semantic SEO signals. Original insight an analysis, topical-depth, and expert authorship are also quality signals that can help improve the ranking potential of content.

To better meet all these signals, a content optimizer tool like the SEO Content Assistant can give you the “cheat codes,” to better ranking content. The tool recommends Focus Terms, outbound links, word count, and can even generate content using GPT-3 technology.

4. Leverage AI-Powered Content Generation

With GPT-3 now widely available, more software engineers are incorporating this powerful NLP model into their applications. That means you are not only competing with the content writers of your competitors, but the robots they may be utilizing to help generate more content, more quickly, than you.

AI copywriting tools still have some way to go before replacing our writers entirely. Also, some tools are far better than others. Still, content marketing teams are already using these tools to speed up ideation, outlining, drafting, and on-page SEO optimization so they can scale up their content development.

Those brands that leverage these technologies, but still keep the human touch, are likely to scale up their SEO content strategy quickly this year.

5. Write Longer Content

Although not officially a Google ranking factor, there is a strong relationship between longer content and higher ranking positions. By improving the topical depth and length of your content, you can signal Google higher quality and more comprehensive exploration of the content.

How long should your content be? There is no magic number, but tools like the SEO Content Assistant will suggest a target word count based on the top ranking content for your target keywords.

6. Review your Content on Mobile

More searches are completed from mobile devices than desktop. That’s why search engines are now prioritizing content by what best suits their predominantly mobile user-base.

To rank better in today’s mobile-first world, you need to be focusing on how your content serves mobile users (even if your current site traffic is predominantly desktop users).

The first place to check for mobile usability issues is within your own Google Search Console. These are issues that Google has already flagged for your site, which means Google is already factoring “mobile usability issues” into your search rankings.

Here are things to look for:

• Are images and assets fitting on the screen?
• Are images and assets resizing appropriately for the screen size?
• Can users easily access all of the page content?
  • Is the page short enough to scroll through easily?
  • Are large/unnecessary page elements taking up all the space?
  • Does the user have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get through the page?
• Are any page elements overlapping in a way that hinders the user viewing content?
• Do you have huge blocks of unbroken text?
• Does the design still look clean?

What you can do:

• Get the user to relevant content faster
  • Hide unnecessary images on mobile
  • Reduce the font size of headers on mobile
  • Move important content to the top of the page
  • Add jump links for longer content
• Make content easier to view/read on a smaller device
  • Make sure images and graphics are resizing responsively
  • Adjust your navigation so mobile users can see all options
  • Break up text into 2-3 sentence blocks
  • Use more whitespace!
• Increase tap areas so it’s easier to scroll to relevant content
• Use a sticky nav so users can always find a “next step” if they get stuck

For more information on mobile SEO check out our Comprehensive Guide to Mobile SEO.

7. Use More Rich Media

Mobile users spend heavy portions of their time on social media feeds, YouTube, and Apps. There are all beautifully designed platforms heavy on visuals and multimedia content.

Multi-media keeps people scrolling, conveys concepts at-a-glance, and helps users interact more fully with content. Multi-media makes blog and page content more engaging.

With images and video pulling in at the top of SERPs now, that content is yet another way to get onto the first page.

8. Meet the User’s Search Intent

BERT helped Google better understand the intent behind search queries and launched at the end of October 2019. BERT-related refreshes and advancements still matter in 2022.

As Google continually refines its understanding of the intent behind search queries it will be serving better results, especially for long-tail queries and never-before-seen queries. This means that you should be hyper-focused on creating content that helps a user find the product, service, information, or entertainment that they’re looking for with a search.

To learn more about recognizing search intent, and indicators for informational vs. commercial oriented keywords, take a look at our What are Keywords in SEO Guide.

9. Write for Humans and Robots

Readability is understood differently by SEO professionals. In general, though, simpler sentences are easier to read and less prone to grammatical errors. In voice search specifically, Google avoids overly-complex language.

It is much easier to understand a badly formulated written answer than an ungrammatical spoken answer, so more care has to be placed in ensuring grammatical correctness.

Keeping your sentences simple can also make your content more accessible to a wider range of users. Although SaaS, software, or technologies companies may have more technical content by nature of their products of service offerings, it’s still important to write in a way that is not too academic or jargon-ridden.

A survey of 15,000 searches across 3 device types found the average reading level for voice responses was 8th grade. For reference, Harry Potter is about the same reading level.

10. Link Strategically

Google pays attention to what resources you share with your users. As Google puts it, outbound links matter because they:

• Show that you’ve done your research and have expertise in the subject manner

• Make visitors want to come back for more analysis on future topics

• Build relationships with other domain experts. For example, sending visitors can get you on the radar of other successful bloggers and begin a business relationship.

“Link Neighborhood” is a term coined by the SEO community. It refers to the type of sites that you link out to, and the type of sites that link back to you, and how they link to each other.

For example, if you were to look at the “link neighborhood” for a celebrity site, you’d probably see a lot of streets to gossip magazines, social media groups, fan sites, and concert venues. If you were to look at the “link neighborhood” for an MIT lab, you might see a lot of streets going to scientific publications, tech news, grant organizations, etc.

Internal links also matter because they keep users navigating across your site. Also, they help crawlers understand your site hierarchy, and spread PageRank across your web pages.

Link neighborhoods help give context for the topical focus of a site, and the relative authority of a site; is harvard.edu linking to the site, or is bestcrystalsforhealing.com linking to the site?

Your link neighborhood is a combination of your outbound links and inbound links coming back to your site and web pages.

Recap: Tips for On Page SEO in 2022

• Make Core Web Vitals Top Priority
• Answer Common Questions
• Use Content Optimization Software
• Leverage AI-Generated Content
• Write Longer Content
• Review your Content on Mobile
• Use More Rich Media
• Meet the User’s Search Intent
• Write for Humans and Robots
• Link Strategically

The post 10 Tips for On Page SEO in 2022 appeared first on LinkGraph.

Although not always the greatest for SEO, Google does index PDFs, and sometimes ranks them, meaning that your executive reports, white papers, survey results, or other PDF content should be using SEO best practices and be optimized for search.

How Does Google See PDF Files?

PDF files are treated like regular pages by search engine crawlers. Google converts PDFs into HTML, and then indexes the HTML version of the page.

FWIW we convert PDFs & other similar document types into HTML for indexing too, so theoretically there wouldn’t be too much difference.

— johnmu is not a cat (@JohnMu) August 30, 2018

In the SERPs, the PDF tag will be visible next to the title tag. This lets the user know that they will be directed to an indexed version of a PDF page rather than a traditional web page.

How to Optimize PDFs for SEO

Because Google does treat PDF files like regular web pages, that means all of the same on-page SEO best practices still apply.

Have an SEO-Friendly File Name

Just like Google looks to file names of your images to understand their relevance to your web page content, your PDF file name should communicate to Google what your content is about. 

Best practices for optimized file names include:

• Short and Sweet
• Includes target keyword
• Accurate description of PDF content

Optimize your PDF Title and Meta Description for your Target Keywords

SEO Meta Tags like the title and meta description of your PDF will be visible to users in the SERPs. They will be used by Google to understand the primary topic of your PDF.

Including your target keywords in these elements of your PDF, and those with Keyword Difficulty scores that are achievable for your website, will help improve your ranking potential.

If you are using Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can edit the title of the PDF via:

• File > Properties
• Edit your title in the Title Field

Similarly, you can also edit your meta description by clicking:

• File > Properties
• Click Additional Metadata

Edit your meta description in the Description field

Designate Headings in your PDF Documents

Just like you use heading tags to help users navigate your web pages (and search engines understand the topical depth of your content), PDFs should also leverage headings.

Most likely, your white paper, report, or PDF document has some natural structure separated by headings. Make sure that you take the time to specify h1-h6 tags in Adobe Acrobat.

• Navigate to the Tags icon on the left sidebar
• Click on the text you want to specify as an h1-h6
• Right click on the tag > Properties
• Select the relevant heading from the Type dropdown list

Include Internal Links to your Website

Having internal links will help direct users to other relevant pages on your website. 

They also signal to Google the range of content that your website offers and what other topic areas you cover.

Google will follow the links in your PDFs, meaning you can use them to spread link equity to other pages.

Don’t Save PDFs as Images

Google is going to struggle to crawl and render the content of your PDF if it is saved as an image file. It also makes it more difficult for users if they want to highlight text.

PDF Issues Flagged in the SearchAtlas Site Auditor

The SearchAtlas site auditor will flag an issue if a web page is linking to a .doc file instead of a .pdf.

.doc and .docx are not seen as SEO best practices because they will not be included in Google’s index, meaning missed opportunities to get your content in front of more audiences.

And because .doc are not compatible for all users like .pdf docs, including PDFs instead provides a better experience for website visitors.

Should I Be Using PDFs?

In general, a web page is more likely to get in front of more audiences because of how easily can be understood and indexed by search engines.

PDFs are generally seen as not great for SEO. But when you do have PDF content, you should make the most of it!

So the short answer is don’t make PDFs a big part of your SEO content strategy. But for content like annual reports and white papers that are in PDF form, optimize them!

The post SEO for PDFs: Get your PDFs Ranking in the SERPs appeared first on LinkGraph.

Speaking of which, there is one thing that all great content marketing operations have in common: they start with keyword research. Choose the right keyword and you may even get away with mediocre content and still get great SEO results. Choose the wrong keyword and you’re doomed from the start.

Here is a guide to choosing keywords for SEO campaigns with a structured process rather than relying on guesswork and assumptions.

Step 1: Determine Your Goal and the Right Keyword Choice Will Come

Not all keywords are created equal. When you take a look at keywords that people search for when they find your website (in Google Analytics or Google Search Console), you can probably spot patterns. Some keywords drive visitors who want to purchase, and other keywords bring visitors who want to read and get educated.

With that in mind, it’s important to determine the marketing goals you want to achieve with your content marketing initiative. What I like to do is sort content into four buckets:

• Solution unaware
• Solution aware
• Product unaware
• Product aware

Each of these four content buckets attracts a different type of audience and has a different overall purpose. Once you determine what type of readers you want to attract and what kind of action you want to drive, you can then go on to choose your ideal keyword(s) and create a keyword list for content creation.

One keyword cannot possibly be ideal for stages of the sales funnel and for all parts of your audience. It would be like trying to cut a steak with a butter knife – because it’s technically a knife.

Determine your content marketing goal first, be it:

• Getting more organic traffic from a search query
• Converting more visitors into free trial users
• Converting more free trial users into paying customers
• Increasing brand awareness and stealing traffic/leads from your customers
• And more.

Once you know the end goal, choosing a keyword becomes that much easier. Don’t worry though – as you gain more experience with keyword research (and your niche and industry), it becomes much easier to determine what kind of keyword is suitable for which digital marketing goal.

Step 2: Look at the Keyword Competition

If you’re in product, finding out what your competitors are working on is virtually impossible. You’ll never know if they’re working on launching new features, updating their existing ones, fixing UX or doing something else. 

Content marketing lets you find out everything your competitors are doing because it’s out in the open. Just load up your favorite SEO tool (like SearchAtlas) and you can see everything you need. If you’re tight on budget, you can use free tools such as Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner instead.

That means keywords too. With just a glance at the Competitor Research tool in SearchAtlas, you can see all of the keywords your competitors are ranking for. Just a few clicks is enough to show you their top pages in terms of organic search traffic and the keywords they’re optimized for.

While this is not the end-all strategy, it’s a great starting point as it will show you if you’re going in the right direction with a web page or not. Copying your competitors is not a viable long-term keyword and content strategy so use competitor research as a basis to determine what you can do better.

Many times, when doing keyword research you’ll spot opportunities in cases where your competitors are trying to rank for a keyword. You’ll easily figure out when you can do better and create a blog post that is more valuable for your readers.

Sometimes, the competitors are performing better simply because they have a higher domain authority and more backlinks.

Step 3: Evaluate the Keyword Metrics

To find the ideal keyword, you’ll first have to sift through a bunch of those which are not exactly ideal. And to determine whether they’re a good fit, you need to look at their metrics. These include:

• Monthly search volume (how many people search for a keyword per month on average)
• Keyword difficulty (how difficult it is to rank in the top 10 for a keyword on a scale from 0 to 100)
• Search intent (how likely someone is to make a purchase or get to some other type of conversion based on what most people look for in the search results.
  Bonus:
• Cost per click for PPC ads (the higher the cost, the more valuable the keyword is in terms of conversions)
• Clicks (if a keyword has significantly more searches than clicks – that means that the person searching can find all the information from the search alone and doesn’t click through to the results)
• Global search volume (sometimes a keyword has low search volume in the USA but has lots of searches globally – making it a good target)

Ideally, you want a lot of search volume, a low keyword difficulty, and a high intent to purchase. This brings us to our next point.

Step 4: Realize that There Are No Perfect Keywords

Finding a keyword that meets all the criteria above is like finding a needle in a haystack. If a keyword has a nice search volume and a good likelihood to drive conversions, it’s likely going to have a very high keyword difficulty.

On the other hand, if a keyword is highly likely to drive new purchases, it’s probably not going to have a very high search volume.

In other words (pardon the pun), you’ll often be forced to make compromises because it rarely happens that one keyword phrase meets all the criteria to be ideal.

The sooner you realize that choosing keywords for SEO is a big game of compromise, the better. The important thing is to keep in mind that each type of keyword drives different results so it’s perfectly fine if a long tail keyword has a search volume of 50 if it’s easy to rank for.

Also, you’ll pick up a bunch of secondary keywords with that one, as long as you write a high-quality piece. And even more importantly, if many of those 50 visitors become customers, then it’s a superb choice.

Step 5: Think About the Topic Cluster As Part of your SEO Strategy

When we create a content plan for an upcoming month or quarter at Whatagraph, we never choose keywords in isolation. Instead, we open up our keyword tool and take a look at topic clusters so that we can cover a bigger topic in more detail.

For example, we recently wrote about Google Data Studio in our Google Data Studio review, making it the central piece of content for this topic cluster. While this is an important keyword to cover, there are also other, related ones where we could cover the topic in depth even more and meet the user intent even better.

For example, we decided to write a bunch of other articles in the meantime, including those about:

• Google Data Studio pricing
• Google Data Studio connectors
• Google Data Studio customer service
• And others

In short, we realized that the main keyword satisfies one type of search intent and that there are other opportunities for keywords that deserve their own pieces. When you’re researching keywords and find one that is hugely relevant to your business, don’t just settle on one piece – dig deeper for related opportunities and create a topic cluster so that your searcher has all the details in one place.

You can also use competitor analysis tools from LinkGraph to find topic cluster opportunities. One great way of doing this is by following the internal links on relevant competitor pieces to see what kind of related topics they cover.

Step 6: Consider Topical Authority in Search Engine Results

Consider the keywords you choose as making small choices that eventually have a larger impact on your target audience. I like to think of it as spending an hour a day in the gym, only to be able to lift massive weights in 6 months.

Let’s explain. Topical authority means that with the content you write, you establish yourself as an authority on a certain topic because you cover a variety of subtopics.

In simpler terms, a website like Whatagraph has lots of different articles on marketing reporting and marketing KPIs. If we were to publish a new article on a marketing reporting tool tomorrow, it would rank more quickly and easily in the top 10 compared to a website that creates content around CRMs, for example.

In other words, search engines consider you an authority on the topic once you cover it with many different subtopics. Moreover, once you cover an entire cluster, rather than writing a one-off article, you provide answers to a large number of potential questions your target audience may have. 

If you’re just starting out with a certain topic, you’ll have a much harder time ranking for a keyword compared to a website that has 50+ articles on similar topics spanning over several years.

Each new keyword you choose should be a part of a bigger plan to achieve topical authority. As you create more content, it becomes easier with each new piece to successfully rank it. Moreover, you’ll have a wealth of internal linking opportunities.

Final Thoughts on Choosing Keywords for SEO

If you’ve followed all the steps so far, you probably know how to find an amazing keyword for your next piece of content. If not, you have an excellent idea on how to get started with keyword research. With the right keywords and the right keyword tool, you’ll not only have an easy time ranking in the SERPs, but you’ll also become the star of your marketing team. Good luck with the research and writing!

About the Author: Mile Zivkovic is the Head of Content at Whatagraph, a marketing reporting tool used by top agencies and in-house marketing teams.

The post Choosing Keywords for SEO: A 6-Step Guide appeared first on LinkGraph.