SEO Sleuthing

Once upon a time, I worked for a small company that made and sold girls clothing. They had a website that brought in a little bit of traffic and they asked me to get more traffic to it so I began researching SEO. I improved things for them and they were happy enough.

Well, let me tell you that SEO from 10+ years ago is NOT the same as SEO today. It changes constantly. So if I’m to stay on top of it, I would need to research it constantly. Which I won’t. But I did research it lately and found a few helpful tips for me. Perhaps they’re helpful for you, too.

1. Keyword research is important. I won’t go into detail on this because you can stop over on the website I linked to and read up on it. Helpful stuff. Think of it like finding the trending hashtags on Twitter.
2. Do something with those keywords. When I’ve done my research, I plan to post blogs in the next few months around these subjects. It’s helpful to have content suggestions when writing.
3. Write about what you’re an expert in. People like hearing from somebody who knows what they’re talking about.
4. Interview an expert.
5. Shoot for 300 words, at least. The magic number seems to be 1,500. Search engines like in-depth, which surprises me, because personally, I prefer to read short, specifically lists. So I want to mix it up: lists for my reading enjoyment, lengthier posts to make search engines happy.
6. Optimize the content. Apparently since I’m on a wordpress platform, there are some good ones out there I should look into and start using such as Yoast and Shareaholic. This one needs further research on my part.
7. Be your own editor. Content reads better with more white space so avoid long paragraphs. Don’t make typos. Use grammar well (not good). Sometimes, I walk away from a blog post before publishing, then come back and read it once I’ve let it sit. I’ll catch mistakes better this way.
8. Do your own PR. For my personal blog, I do this some by sharing my posts to Facebook. Other places to share: instagram, reddit, twitter, digg, and stumbleupon.

So that’s the start of my research. What did I miss? What else is important for SEO?