While many traffic strategies have come and gone, Search Engine Optimization is probably THE internet strategy that isn’t going away. No matter what Google does to try to mess with website owners’ rankings, there’s just too much money in ranking high to throw SEO in the garbage.
These are 5 strategies that have been working for awhile, and will continue to work in the future:
1. Tweeting, Facebooking, and Google Plus-ing Your Posts
Anytime a major site allows you to post a link back to your site, that’s a great start. Obviously a bazillion other people are posting links to their sites as well, and because of the nature of social media, these links aren’t as valuable as it would be from an authority site in your niche linking just to you.
However, this strategy is too easy to overlook and can help provide a nice little foundation for growing a traffic base to your site.
2. Interlinking Your Posts
Any chance you get, reference other blog posts of yours inside your own posts and link to them. Now, this might not have a direct effect on SEO, but the longer people stay on your site and the more engagement you can coax out of visitors, the more Google perceives you as a relevant site.
3. Give Your Pics an Alt Tag
Alt tags basically give a description of your image, but doesn’t show up on the page itself. The reason for these is that a search engine spider can’t decipher what an image is without text. By describing the image, search engine spiders can then index your image, potentially allowing your images to show up in image searches on search engines. Another easy strategy that can pay back nice dividends!
4. Turn Your Post into a YouTube Video
For each post you write, create a little PowerPoint video explaining the basic points. People are always on the lookout for short 2-3 minute tips on how to improve – and your videos can do just that.
YouTube videos tend to rank well by themselves, and they allow you to stick a link in the description. Not only can that video send traffic to your site, but a link from YouTube can be valuable. Search engines understand that it takes effort to produce and upload a video from YouTube, which is clearly more time consuming than posting a link on Facebook.
5. Guest Post
Honestly, this is still the king of SEO today. It is by far the number one strategy, and it seems that every blog that ranks well has incorporated a guest posting strategy. It works because it’s time consuming (meaning less competition!) and you’re receiving links from other blogs in your niche. Google can never shut down guest posting altogether because the Internet is based around connecting information – they’d have to shut down all links to eradicate this method.
The simple idea behind it is that you find a blog in your niche that accepts guest posts, send them an email with an idea, write the blog post, and have the publisher post it on their site with a bio and a backlink pointing back to your site. It may sound easy, but that many steps leads to it being a time consuming strategy – but one that pays serious dividends in the future.