The year is coming to an end and we’re all looking forward to 2019. Have you thought about what you’d like to improve in the coming months? Here at AE Digital Creative (AEDC⚡️), we’re looking at ways to help you improve your digital presence – namely your site’s SEO!
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It can be overwhelming, and you can very easily get lost down the rabbit hole. We’re here to help you push your site up the Google search rankings the right way – using best practices. We’re covering some basic concepts here, but we’ll take it a few steps further in future posts. Without further ado, here are our 5 SEO tips for 2019:
1. Write for Your Audience
It’s easy to get tunnel-vision and write strictly to fit as many keywords as possible into each paragraph, but does that really bring value to the people reading it? It’s very likely that your writing will come across disjointed and impersonal if it’s even readable. It’s important to recognize that getting people on your site to read your content is one of the primary goals of SEO. Write for your audience, not explicitly for the bots crawling your site. The more quality content you add, the more people will stay on your site, and the more Google will recognize your site as having relevant information – meaning it will send more people your way in the future.
2. Keyword Research
Of all the SEO tips for 2019, keyword research is my personal favorite – it’s like a puzzle! The ways keyword research can benefit your site are almost infinite. When done correctly, keyword research will help people find your business or website based off of what you do – the main goal of SEO. There are an array of tools you can use when conducting your own keyword research, many advocate the use of Google’s Keyword Planner but that can be difficult if you don’t have an active Google Ads account. However you generate your list, it’s important to look at the metrics that show how competitive each keyword is and how often they’re searched. For example, it would be much more difficult to rank for “pet food” than “dry vegan cat food” due to how general the keyword is. Once you’ve put together your list of keywords you’d like to rank for, it’s time to write content around those terms and repeat.
3. Link Building
Link building is important – like really important. The three types of links on your site (internal, inbound, and external) all serve different purposes, but they all help to either drive traffic to your site or to another site that has relevant information. In a nutshell, the more quality links to your page, the better – but it’s important to focus on the quality of the links and how they fit within your content. In the past, people have abused how search engines recognized links (using “black hat” tactics – the opposite of best practices,) as a result, the ways search engines attribute value to links have gotten much more complex. This is great for you if you’re following the rules – but if you’re trying to game the system, it’s very likely you get penalized on the way and potentially banned from search engines. Moral of the story – stick to best practices!
4. Create a Sitemap
A sitemap does not directly drive traffic to your site, it’s not even technically for the people visiting your page – but that doesn’t mean it’s not important! Creating a sitemap helps bots (from search engines) crawl your site and make sure every page has been indexed. Sitemaps are especially important if you’re managing an e-commerce site, your site is extremely expansive with tons of pages, or if your site is brand new and has few internal and/or external links. Creating and submitting a sitemap is an easy step towards an improved presence within search results and for that reason, it makes our list of the top SEO tips for 2019!
5. Post Post Post!
This is one of the most important SEO tips for 2019 and for the foreseeable future. While there isn’t a perfect schedule you should follow when posting content for optimal SEO value – what’s important is that you update your site regularly! Posting new content consistently shows both your site’s visitors and search engines that you’re still increasing the value your site can bring to others – and that your site hasn’t been abandoned. Posting quality content consistently is potentially the best thing you can do to lift your site up the search rankings.
As we round out 2018, it’s vital to look at how you can improve your presence on the digital front in the coming year. Whether you’re building a site from scratch or improving on your current site, our SEO tips for 2019 will set you up for success. Stay on the lookout for our follow-up blogs on SEO among other things, and if you have any questions about how we can create a comprehensive digital ecosystem for your brand – we’d love to talk with you! Happy holidays, Y’all!