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Seven easy tips for developing an effective SEO strategy


SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Having a well-thought and consistent SEO strategy for your website is one of the most effective things you can do to boost the exposure your content gets and widen your audience.

All these might sound like complex, tech-jargon but in reality, developing and refining your SEO strategy is one of the quickest, easiest things you can do.

Here are 7 easy SEO tips to boost your online audience:

1. Create Good Content

Quality content is the best SEO booster.

Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings. Good content created specifically for target audience increases web traffic, which improves your site’s authority and relevance.

2. Use Keywords

Identify a keyword phrase for each page. Think about how your reader might search for that specific page (with phrases like “Centre for Journalism Studies Cardiff,” “best journalism program,” or “UK journalism degrees”). Then, repeat this phrase throughout the page.

However, never sacrifice good writing for SEO. The best pages are written for the user, not for the search engine. Always use your keywords naturally.

3. Don’t restrain the keyword use on the text

Take advantage of all the spaces in which you can use your keywords.

Take advantage of all the spaces in which you can use your keywords.

Besides the text, you can use your keywords in the Page title, URL, image captions and tags. Take advantage of these in every post!

Always describe your visual and video media using alt tags, or alternative text descriptions. They allow search engines to locate your page.

Search engines also rate keywords in header tags more heavily. By including relevant terms in your header tags, you are also boosting your SEO ranking against those keywords.

4. Use links

The more links your site has, the quicker it will be indexed by search engines and the more often search engines will come back to it.

Spider-driven search engines use robots to spider websites across the Internet by travelling through links from web page to web page.

A website’s score or placement within a spider engine is derived from hundreds of variables such as; link popularity, clicks and keywords among others.

The more sites that link to you, the more important the engines believe your content to be.

Search engines also use links as a measure of how ‘legitimate’ an individual website is partially based on how many outgoing links it has. By putting hyperlinks into your piece, you can boost your SEO score.

Focus on creating relevant links within the text. Instead of having “click here” links, try writing out the name of the destination.

"Click here” has no search engine value beyond the attached URL, whereas “Nieman Journalism Lab Harvard” is rich with keywords and will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.

5. Word count


Aim for a minimum of 350 words per post.

You should strive for a minimum of 350 words per post. Longer content indicates that your post will have something substantial to offer to the reader.

Although word count won’t help you if your content is not helpful to people; longer content does give you the opportunity to provide more value, include more keywords, incorporate more outbound links, and to get people to spend more time in your site.

Based on this research, content between 2,000 – 2,500 words seems to rank the highest in search engine results.

6. Use Multimedia

Studies show that using multimedia content can attract more users and keep them engaged for a longer time at your website.

Images, videos and audio act as a signal of quality content to search engines.

As described in tip No3, captions should be used to their full potential. Don’t just tell people what’s obviously there, but provide extra information and depth. Describing the image is what the alt-text is for. This is also where you can include your keywords to make it seem more relevant to search engines. Tags can also be a place to include keywords.

It’s found that websites using videos can achieve a 4.8% higher conversion rate, compared to a 2.9% average on websites that don’t use videos.

7. Share your content

Image: flickr.com

Having social media sharing buttons on your posts can go a long way into helping you improve your SEO visibility.

Facebook shares, Tweets and other social media mentions can boost SEO rank. Make sure to install social sharing buttons on your website!


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