This is a guest post by Shantanu Biswas. If you wish to publish a guest post on this website please read the guidelines.

To boost ranks and traffic, SEO professionals have depended largely on significant keywords for years. However, SEO experts knows that there is a thin line between writing keyword-rich, but boring, content pieces and developing great content that actually resonates with the target audience and generates sales.

If you rely too heavily on keyword research and on-page SEO, you’ll wind up with dull content that resonates more with search engines than with your intended audience. The difference between garnering several website visitors and developing loyal consumers can be determined by improving the art of SEO content writing.

Going beyond keyword research and fully realizing how words can be employed to both garnering traffic and increase conversions is the key to success.

Make it a point to deliver high-quality content

Content is an important part of a website and everybody should know that. The trick is to use all your content marketing knowledge and generate compelling content that your target audience will value. Content that addresses your customers’ concerns, offers them useful insights, and enlightens them so they may be great at what they do is everything a piece of valuable content will incorporate.

Don’t forget to employ relevant keywords organically in the outstanding content you’re writing. Do not even try to cram your pages with keywords in order to boost your site’s ranking (also known as keyword stuffing). It will not improve your search engine ranking. If search engines discover your site doing this, they may penalize it by decreasing its ranking or deleting it entirely from their results.

Some sites say that you should create content that is long (1000+ words) so that the reader will spend longer on your website, but longer is not always better. Have your content answer the question, insight or enlightenment as soon as you can. This may lead to someone spending less time on your site, but it will lead to them be happier, which may result in them reading more of your content.

Make your site look good on mobile

You may create your website on a desktop or laptop, but there are people who will visit your website that are on a mobile device. If your website doesn’t look good, or they can’t read the content they will go elsewhere.

How do you get your website to look good on mobile? You could resize your browser window to a mobile size, use a mobile page test website like Mobile Moxie’s page-oscope, Mobile-friendly test by Google, WebPageTest, or view your staging site on your mobile device.

You can’t test for every mobile device. Encourage your website visitors to give you feedback if they have any issues, maybe through a dedicated feedback page or on social media.

Who is your target audience and what are they looking for?

It is not sufficient to conduct keyword research to determine what people are looking for. If this is the basis of your work, you’ll probably get a few visitors but you may not make any money from it. Try creating a reader survey to see where else your readers go, and what they want to read.

If you don’t have a dedicated reader base yet then there are other things you can use to see what they are looking for. The most popular search engines have a tool you can connect your site to and they will give you reports on what keywords your site is ranking on. Google has Google Search Console, Bing has Bing Webmaster Tools and most other search engines have something similar.

After getting your site connected and giving it time to populate you can see what keywords people have used to go to your site. Some may give you how many people used that keyword as well. There are some paid SEO tools that offer this but for reliable results connect directly to the search engines.

Get quality backlinks

Getting backlinks is yet another important factor in SEO ranking when we get into the more technical aspects of things. Backlinking is when another website links your article and theirs. It will increase the likelihood of users clicking through to your website given how it is visible on other trustworthy domains. So, in a way, you will also increase your website traffic.

Backlinks can come in the form of:

• Guest posting (only if the site is open to these)
• Testimonials & feedback
• Social media posts
• Helping a reporter out (HARO)
• Fixing broken links
• Guest appearances on podcasts or YouTube videos
• Getting your link on a resource page

Some backlinks you get may be dofollow and some may be nofollow, some sites may suggest you should always get dofollow and if you don’t then it could hurt your website. That is not the case, nofollow is just as important as dofollow. People have done tests, and they have found nofollow sometimes is just as good as dofollow, it still helps to bring you people to your website, and it can help to rank your website higher.

Come up with a compelling title and meta description

It’s vital to write titles for your web pages that are both engaging and intriguing. Make sure they catch the attention of your target audience. People will not read all of the amazing stuff below if they don’t find the title to be catchy.

Similarly, the length of meta descriptions that appear in search results varies depending on screen size, device type, and other technical considerations, there is no set length for SEO meta descriptions. However, compose content that is between 135 and 160 characters long to stay inside the most typical length range.

Generate a meta description and title tag for each landing page and blog post you publish as a best practice. If you haven’t done it already and have a lot of pages, begin with the most important ones.

Setup and monitor your analystics

Do you know how many people are coming to your website? Do you know what pages they are going to? Setup a website analystics so you can know.

There are many website analystics offered, it all depends on your technical level and budget. Some options are Google Analystics (free), Matomo (paid or self-hosted), Fathom Analystics (paid – affiliate link), Clicky (free and paid options – affiliate link) or even Simple Analystics (paid).

Once you have set it up and given time for the analystics to collect data, you can see what pages your visitors are reading and what links they are clicking on. This can help you to write more content related to that.

Setup a sitemap and Robots.txt

This is sort of a two in one, but one that every site should these. A sitemap helps search engines to know what other content is on your website. Some website systems may already have a sitemap setup, I would encourage you to check to see if one exists on your website.

Every website should also have a robots.txt file, which will tell search engines what pages or posts not to show in their search results. If you have any test pages, or you have a dashboard behind a login those are two things you will want to disallow in your robots.txt file. There is a standard format that search engines read. If you are unsure if you have a robots.txt then I would encourage you to use one of many online testers.

Submit your site to search engines

A search engines like Google say they will pick up your website at some point, to speed that process you can submit your website to almost every search engines. I would discourage you to use one of the site that say you can give them your website url and they will submit it, and instead you can do it yourself. Some search engines even provide reports back to you when you do this. Kinsta has a great guide on how to submit your site to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Link internally

Are you linking to other content already on your website? Not only will search engines see your website more, it will get people to spend more time on your website.

You should already being linking to content, both that are on other websites, and other pages on your website. How can you do this? If you know you are going to mention something then link to that post on your site which has more details. Another method is having an list of related posts somewhere on the page, this is usually at the bottom.

To sum up

SEO is continually developing and changing field. It may take a long time to make a big difference on your website. Not all the changes have to take to place at the same time, and you don’t have to learn everything about SEO.

If you put in the time to learn even the fundamentals of SEO, you’ll notice a significant improvement in your website’s click-through rates, engagement, and, eventually the search engine rankings.

Bio of Shantanu: Shantanu is the founder and SEO expert of Page Potato, a digital marketing agency in Melbourne, Australia. He helps small-scale start-ups plan and boosts their business online using strategies that are tailor-made for their specific business needs. Other than work, Shantanu also loves trying new recipes and spending lazy Sunday afternoons playing with his kitten, Smokey.