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The New Improved Rules of SEO

A lot of people think that SEO is just a trick, or a bunch of shifty tricks to take to get people to come to your website. While it is true that some of the methods you read about seem somewhat unethical, the fact is that if you follow the rules of SEO without trying to mislead anyone, you’ll find that they are sound business practices that help you build brand awareness, get more traffic and make more sales in an honest and effective manner.

Consumers Are Smarter Today

Most people who are shopping online are clued in on the tricks of the trade now. They understand sales pages, and know what clickbait is and they don’t like most of them. You want to acknowledge that fact with everything you do. Respect their time and don’t trick your audience.

Mobile Optimization Is an Imperative

Today websites need to work seamlessly on any device, so mobile optimization is very important. Your audience needs to be able to read, learn, interact, and purchase through their mobile devices without missing a beat.

SEO Is a Long-Term Strategy

Working on the SEO structure of your websites and blogs will take time. It should not be considered an overnight success measure. Instead, it should be considered a long-term strategy that will work over time to affect traffic on your site.

Content Needs to Provide Value

If you know your audience and understand the message that you want to send to them, you’ll be able to create amazing content that provides a lot of value to your audience. The information should be trustworthy, expertly written, without grammatically errors, and interesting to read.

Keyword Density Is Old News

Keywords should be in the title tags, content, H1 tags, URLs, alt text on images, and within the image name. Keywords in content should be included in a natural way without any concern about “density”.

Satisfy the Needs of Your Users

This goes back to creating content for the different personas within your target audience. You have to put yourself in their shoes and know what they would find valuable and useful.

You Must Earn Links

Links tell search engines how authoritative your website is, what topic your website should be ranked for, how trustworthy your website is, and how valuable the content you create is. If people are linking to and sharing your content, engaging with the content, and visiting your website, you’ll earn links. In other words, skip the article directories, blog networks, comment spamming, and link trading. They don’t work.

Social Is a Must

The reason you need to use social media is to build community and relationships so that you can distribute your content and information to people who desire it, need it, and want it. You can simply help people out and then reap the rewards.

When you accept these new rules of SEO, you’ll be more successful with your SEO strategy – whether it’s on-page or off-page SEO. Remember that it’s a long-term process that will pay off many times over if you keep up to date on the new rules of SEO.