SEO

10 Best Free SEO Tools in 2022

best free seo tools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is like Game of Thrones; you need to battle with your competitors using the right keywords and techniques to be on top of the Search Engine Results.

However, choosing the right SEO tool is one of the challenges nowadays considering the level of competition out there.

But we are here to help you prepare for the battle with the list of best free SEO tools, handpicked by our experts. There are SEO-free tools as well in case you are on a specific budget.

Best Free SEO Tools In 2020

1.  SEMrush

SEMrush is the Marketer’s favourite tool. It’s one of the best on-page SEO tools to analyze your website and that of your competitors. You can look at your trending articles, social shares, word count, and related keywords all in one place. This makes it easier for you to research well before writing your blog post and helps you analyze it after publishing the post.

Screenshot of SEMrush for Top 10 SEO Tools in 2019 published by Netilly

The best thing about this tool is that it also helps you plan the content for your blog with its content marketing kit. Not just that, SEMrush gives about 14M ideas for a single keyword. Just imagine how great that would be for your content chart.

Digital Marketing Specialist, Brenton Marcum, said their keyword strategy for writing copy for blog posts, websites, social media, and their clients, is done using SEMrush.

Type: Tool

Pricing: Paid – $99 per month

Best for Keyword research, Competitor analysis

Key Features:

  • Analyse competitor’s keywords, ad budgets, and marketing activities
  • Find less competitive keywords
  • Compare domains side-by-side
  • Get visual data in terms of charts
  • Segmentation of your keywords by topic
  • Perform Site Audit
  • Check your website using On-Page SEO Checker
  • Get useful insights about your site’s organic traffic
  • Measure and compare the performance of your content

2.  Mangools

Mangools is one of the best SEO software which comprises of below tools:

  • KW Finder (Keyword research)
  • SERP Checker (SERP Analysis)
  • SERP Watcher (Rank tracking)
  • Link Miner (Backlink Analysis)
  • Site Profiler (SEO Metrics and Insights)

Their USP is that they have a very smooth user interface which doesn’t require any technical knowledge to use.

The best thing is you can get a ten-day free trial without a credit card.

Also, they offer 40% off on their annual plans with unlimited keyword suggestions on Mangools premium and agency plan.

Type: Software

Pricing: Paid

Monthly

Basic-49$, Premium-69$, Agency-129$

Annual

Basic-29$, Premium-39$, Agency-79$

Best for: Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis, Backlinks

Key Features:

  • Keyword analysis and suggestions
  • Analyse Competitor’s keywords
  • SERP analysis
  • Tracks your website ranking
  • Check backlinks
  • Checks Domain Authority, Page Authority and Credibility of a website
  • Provides a browser extension
  • Analyse Google’s SERP changes
  • Helps check website’s SERP snippet

3.  Serpstat

Serpstat is a great all in one SEO tool whose mission is to help businesses outrank their competition to gain higher profits.

It was founded in 2013 as a keyword tool but later became all in one SEO platform in 2016 focusing on generating leads through organic and paid search.

While they also help you track your competition and improve your content.

Interestingly, they have about 5 billion keywords in their database, and 25,000 are updated every minute.

The best thing about Serpstat is that they provide a free plan which helps you find relevant keywords, analyse backlinks, and do competitor’s research.

You can also save 20% on yearly SEO plans.

Type- Software

Pricing – Free for limited tools, Paid (Lite, Standard, Advance, Enterprise)

Monthly

Lite-69$, Standard-149$, Advance-299$, Enterprise-499$

Yearly

Lite-55$/month, Standard-119$, Advance- 239$, Enterprise- 399$

Best for – Keyword research, PPC analysis and competitor’s research

Key Features

  • Helps you do keyword research and competitor’s analysis
  • Analyse PPC campaigns
  • Track your website rankings
  • Gives content ideas
  • Performs On-page SEO audit
  • Track your competitor’s keyword positioning
  • Displays reports and infographics
  • Uses API
  • Analyses Backlinks

4.  Moz

Moz is one of the best SEO tools that is used by many experts. Despite the regular algorithm changes that Google does, Moz is one tool that is up to date. Besides, it is also known for its chat support to the customers.

Moz

Moz comes with a free trial period of 30 days, post which you can decide whether to buy it or not. Now, that’s something great because most of the paid SEO tools allow you to have a trial for only seven days.

The ‘page optimization feature’ is said to be the best as it helps you optimize every single page of the website by clearly mentioning where to make changes or what to add.

Type: Software

Pricing: Paid – @99 per month post 30 days free trial period

Best for: Keyword Research, SEO Report, SEO Audit, Backlink Research

Key Features:

  • Allows you to track the keywords for which you’re ranking.
  • Finds out issues on your website and alerts you about the same.
  • Prioritized recommendations enable you to optimize your web pages.
  • Get custom suggestions that help you create content.
  • Link Explorer helps you find quality backlinks for your website.
  • Moz Local helps small businesses and enterprises get maximum outputs with minimum efforts.

Watch our you tube video as well to have more information on SEO Tools:

5.  Post Affiliate Pro

Post affiliate pro is the highest-rated and reviewed SEO affiliate software that helps you improve your site’s ranking on SERP’s (search engine result pages). It also facilitates tracking the growth of affiliate programs and networks.

It has a very intuitive user interface, so it’s easy to manage commissions, campaign manager and reports.

One can integrate post affiliate pro with over 170 payment gateways and CMS.

The best thing is they are giving a 14 day free trial for network owners, merchants and affiliates.

Type-Software

Pricing-Paid post 14-day free trial

Pro-97$, Ultimate-197$, Network-477$

Best for – Manage affiliate and network programs

Key Features

  • Affiliate link styles
  • Direct link tracking
  • Forced matrix
  • Commission groups
  • Performance awards
  • Split Commission
  • Flash banners
  • Html banners
  • Image banners
  • Mass payments
  • Multilingual Support
  • Web2.0(Ajax)
  • Campaign, banner and affiliate report
  • Map overlay report
  • Online users report

6.  Answer The Public

Answer The Public is a keyword research tool that gives a free report of what your consumers are searching. The report is displayed in a visually appealing format with several questions and tags.

answer-the-public

It’s an online tool for content ideas as well. While the free version gives useful insights, you can also go for the Pro version, which is beneficial for agencies.

Type: Online tool

Pricing: Free /  Paid ( Pro version for $99 per month)

Best for: Keyword Research, Content Ideas

Key Features:

  • Get search results in the form of questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and other related keywords
  • Displays visual data
  • Allows you to save the displayed data in the form of an image
  • Helps you generate content ideas

7.  Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is everyone’s favourite as it is a free tool for SEO. It’s the lighter version of paid tools. Performing keyword research using Ubersuggest is quite easy; you can do it either by entering your competitor’s URL or by entering the seed keyword.

The latest update of this tool also allows one to find out backlinks of your competitor’s site. Not just that, you can easily get long-tail and short-tail keywords along with SEO difficulty.

Type: Online tool

Pricing: Free

Best for: Keyword Research, Backlinks

Key Features:

  • Estimated visit counts give you an idea about how much traffic you can get
  • Keyword suggestions based on the entered keyword
  • Get content ideas for your website
  • Provides the backlink data
  • Visit your competitor’s top-ranking pages

8.  Seo Site Checkup

SEO Site Checkup is a tool that is useful to optimize your website for SEO. Checking your website manually for errors or issues to be fixed is a time taking process, but SEO SiteCheckup automatically does it for you. All you need to do is, enter your website URL and get a real-time report and fixes that are required.

This tool solves all the SEO issues instantly with just one click. It’s an excellent tool for beginners as well as professionals. You can monitor your website’s SEO performance on a day-to-day basis and change it accordingly.

SEO SiteCheckup is one of the best SEO audit free tool, which is available for a free trial period of 14 days.

Type:  Tool

Pricing: Paid – $24.95 per month post-14-day trial.

Best for: SEO Audit, Monitoring, Competitor Analysis

Key Features:

  • Analyse your SEO issues instantly
  • Day-to-day SEO monitoring
  • Notifies when your SEO score changes
  • Compare your competitor’s SEO side-by-side
  • Generate SEO reports
  • Create automated checkups

9.  Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best tools for SEO, and many bloggers recommended it. This tool crawls the website efficiently and gives almost accurate results. You can perform keyword research by either entering your competitor’s URL or by typing the seed keyword. This gives you a list of keywords, both long-tail, and short-tail.

keyword research tool

You can filter your keywords according to search volume, keyword density, paid difficulty, etc. That’s the best part of this tool. Also, it allows you to vomit negative keywords.

Ahrefs is freely available for seven days.

Type: Tool

Pricing: Paid – $99 per month after 7 day trial period

Best for: Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, Site Audit, Content Ideas

Key features:

  • Site Explorer for getting insights about organic traffic and backlinks
  • Use Keywords explorer for getting the right keywords
  • Content explorer gives you content ideas
  • Site audit feature shows you the issues that need to be fixed
  • Find the content gap of your competitors and generate content for your site
  • Compare multiple links of competitors at once

10.  Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a free tool by google ads. You can use it to find low competition keywords. However, it doesn’t display the search volume precisely.

The keyword planner is mainly used for paid ad campaigns. It helps you discover new keywords and also shows the bid estimates for those keywords.

Type: Tool

Pricing: Free

Best for: Ad Campaigns, Keyword Research

Key features:

  • Search the most relevant keywords for your business
  • Find out how often a keyword is searched
  • Gives you suggested bid estimates for each keyword
  • Add the finalized keywords to your advertising plan

Conclusion

 

These are the must-have tools to aid and support your SEO Efforts. Using them will make your research easier and will surely help you rank better provided you work hard consistently and keep optimizing your website and content regularly.

However, the free version of most of these tools provides limited functionality, and sooner or later you will need to upgrade to paid versions especially if you run a digital marketing agency. One such tool is SEOptimer which provides a 14-day free trial. So, you can try it out without having to pay upfront.

You can get started with one tool or use multiple tools for different purposes and share your feedback with us.

If you’d like to discuss how the best free SEO tools can help your business or brand, then please drop us an email or leave your contact details and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our SEO Specialists.

10 Best Free SEO Tools in 2022 Read More »

How does Content Marketing help Drive Organic Traffic to a Website and aid SEO?

How-does-content-marketiing-aid-seo

You must have possibly heard that – getting traffic from a search engine is hard, but buying traffic is easy. Though garnering organic (free) traffic is no cakewalk, but it’s the best way to get traffic for any business for two reasons.

Firstly, around 80% of web users ignore paid ads in search results. Secondly, it sends you the most targeted traffic, and once you do it right, its free traffic.

In fact, more than 51% of content consumption in 2018 was majorly driven by organic search. Hence, boosting organic traffic for your website or content is the best way forward!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to get organic traffic, and the ROI proves to be higher as time elapses.

Building organic traffic through SEO is undoubtedly the hardest effort you’ll ever put into your website. But the time and effort on this can essentially become the most significant investment.

Reason being the SEO content you put on your website today will drive traffic not only today or tomorrow but for the long term probably several years from now.

This is not the case with paid Google AdWords, which will not get you any traffic the moment you stop paying. That’s why focusing on enhancing organic traffic through SEO is an effort worthy enough for the long-term.

When it comes to following the right approach to garner more organic traffic, Whitehat SEO is the best way to stay on top of traffic that is sustainable as we discussed in our beginner’s blog on SEO.

Let us now dive a little deeper to understand how SEO boosts organic site traffic at no cost except your time.

How Content Marketing and SEO complement each other

SEO works like a navigation tool for customers to seek the right information and content. Businesses invariably depend on marketing mediums like social media and email to propagate their content.

Both SEO and content are the critical ingredients for an efficient and effective digital marketing plan. 

Customers query on a product or service goes typically through a search task on the search engine to get a glimpse of the available information.

Seeking the right target audience for content using social media and email campaigns is a difficult task. Here the SEO tool acts as an enabler to find the relevant customer with the specific need at present. Reaching these active and relevant customers with the appropriate content would create awareness with the right audience. 

Hence, Content marketing and SEO complement each other to create an effective digital marketing plan.

Content Marketing | Netilly

The best practice  to enhance your SEO is Content marketing

In content marketing, you can frame the appropriate content by visualizing the keywords which customers would use during their online search for information. This would lead to improved visibility for your content. As a result, the customer gets to view your content and brand whenever he keys in the keywords aligned to your content. This initiates the stage of awareness and helps to build a funnel.

Relevant content leads to a higher ranking on the search engines and enables cost-free visibility online. This helps enhance your brand awareness and attract relevant customer traffic on your website. Higher the customer traffic to your website, the funnel size grows accordingly.

Seo and content marketing

SEO and Content marketing together can get new leads.

SEO and content marketing work together to help you reach new leads through search engines like Google. SEO and Content marketing together can get new points.

Content Marketing and SEO are two different approaches; each has its distinct strengths. But they become more useful when they act together. SEO is more like a direction signboard and Content is the pitstop to the destination.

SEO becomes instrumental when the content creation is on the lines of the customers’ mind map. At the same time, Content would be highly recommended by the search engines only when supplied with the relevant keywords. SEO needs to supplement Content to ensure successful execution of your Online marketing plan.

Create Quality Content & Optimize Old Content at Reposting

The intent of creating content is not to fill the website pages or blogs just for the sake of doing it. Publishing valuable content that renders value to its readers is the reason behind the search engines, ranking a good content website higher.

Your website is a representation of your business, and usually, it’s the first impression a potential customer may have of your business.

Essentially your website is a representation of your business, and it forms the first impression about your business in a potential customer’s mind.

You shouldn’t be publishing low-quality blog posts just as you wouldn’t deliver a crappy product or service,

In fact, when you publish unique and information-packed content, it acts as an ultimate marketing strategy where the content ranks higher for relevant keywords.

With search engines becoming smarter over time, they can weigh the content you have posted. If the content is good, it is ranked higher, and that is how organic traffic reaches the website or blog.

So before hitting the ‘Publish’ button, give your content everything you can.

Further updating and republishing older blog posts with new content and good images or insightful videos can grow organic traffic by as much as around 111%.

Using Long Tail Key Phrases

Primary keywords have higher search volumes. However, broad two or three-word key phrases are highly competitive. So rather than going for the most popular keywords, it is better to use keywords that are more specific to your product or service.

Instead of sticking to the addition of two or three phrases of keywords switch to long tail key phrases.

Let’s take an example – if you are running a digital marketing agency, then instead of trying to rank for the term ‘digital marketing agency’, narrow it down a bit more and go for something like ‘digital marketing agency for real estate’.

This will narrow down your content ranking for those specific keywords that are more relevant and will lure potential leads to your website with higher chances of conversion.

Long-tail key phrases are likely to be closer to what a real user would be typing into a search engine while looking for something on the web. Thus the long tail keywords have lesser competition and higher relevancy.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is purely a genuine way to earn links that are valuable to your website. Publishing your content on a high authority website is a perfect way to garner more eyeballs. Make sure you post quality content on these websites and expose it the way you present your own blog on social media channels.

Apart from this, some of the best practices to consider when guest posting are:

  • Aim for publishing guest posts only for trusted websites with high domain authority and decent traffic.
  • Create content in and around your niche o reach your ideal audience.
  • Create relevant backlinks to some of your blogs or content on your own website.
  • Engage with the readers regularly by responding to their comments irrespective of whether it’s a guest post on someone else’ website. This is a great way to build a rapport and establish a relationship with those visitors. 

Create & Use Relevant Internal Links

You need to work strategically to create powerful internal links in your blogs and on your website to guide your visitors to more relevant content.

This can boost your search rankings by keeping visitors on your website for longer. But this will happen only if you have used links in a way that are natural and relevant for the reader and not created just for the heck of creating an internal link. Ultimately internal links should add value and provide relevant information to the visitors.

Once a page is ranked higher in a search engine, you can internally link it to other pages on your website. This way, you can embrace the SEO aspects for those other pages also to possibly get high ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

There is no shortcut to it- all you need to make sure is that you keep good links and keep removing the bad ones periodically. However, don’t overuse internal links else it will look like spam.

Utilize Social Media Promotion 

It has become imperative to build a substantial presence across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Google understands that recommendation for any shared content, on all these social media channels by people within their trusted social community, is a great signal to rank that content or website higher.

All of the social media marketing (SMM) promotional activities help to get your brand and website address out on the internet. Write content worthy enough of sharing and add share buttons within your content and website so that people can share your content or website easily.

Monitor Regularly 

It is very crucial to monitor what is happening within your domain. Use tools like Google Analytics to track visitors to your blog and website.

 You can fine-tune your content after analyzing where the visitors are coming from and what keywords they searched.

It is also advisable to monitor your competitor’s social profiles to see what’s working for them and try to do it better than them.

Try to be in Google’s Good Books 

Avoid using any unethical ways to get good ranking on search engines as it’s unwise to be on Google’s wrong side. You should always look for increasing organic traffic ethically or else be ready to get hit with a Google penalty sooner or later.

Achieving good ranking in search engines through ethical means might be a time consuming process, but eventually, it gives good results in the long term in terms of increasing organic traffic.

Don’t buy inbound links or build cheap links. Also, don’t publish low quality or plagiarized content.

Instead, get into the habit of creating quality content that aids users and provides a solution to what they are looking for. Eventually, that will drive more organic traffic than any other alternate shortcut ever will do. 

Conclusion

Hard work always gets the best results, and it’s no different on the web. If you are looking for more organic traffic, you must put more effort into it. 

That means giving your best effort every time, identifying the niche for content, understanding good and bad backlinks, knowing your keywords, guest blogging strategically, staying on Google’s good side and lastly you need to consistently implement all of these to create an organic reach over your competitor.

The most important task is to closely monitor what SEO technique is bringing you more organic traffic. Once it is identified, keep implementing it consistently to get results that are organic and gigantic. 

If you have any questions or need assistance about building organic traffic for your website, please leave a comment below or drop us an email. We will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our SEO experts.

How does Content Marketing help Drive Organic Traffic to a Website and aid SEO? Read More »

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

image for blog search engine optimization

The invention of the internet and its impact on the way the world works has been nothing less than revolutionary. Take Google as an example. Today, we have become so dependent on the most popular search engine for finding the information that we need, that people use its name as a synonym for the word “search.”

Google receives 63,000 search queries per second, which translates to 5.6 Billion searches per day! Have you ever wondered how website links are prioritized on result pages when you search for anything on a search engine like Google?

Do you usually click the topmost links which appear on the first page of the search engine results? A lot of this makes a fundamental difference when it comes to businesses engaged in the selling of products and (or) services “online”.

Interestingly, 93% of all website traffic is majorly driven by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, etc. If we specifically talk about Google, 75% of people searching through the web start their searches on Google, and the first five results on Google get 67% of all clicks.

The higher your website link shows up on the search engine result pages (SERPs), the better it is! But how does one achieve the topmost rankings for their website? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the obvious answer.

What is SEO?

SEO is a technique of optimizing one’s website to “rank” higher in the organic SERPs. It is the most effective method to generate organic (natural or free) traffic to your site.

The organic search results are those that appear directly below the top pay-per-click (PPC) adverts in Google, pre-fixed with Ad icon, and are most viable for the long-term. Such as highlighted below:

An Organic Search Result below the Pay Per Click Advertisement

SEO can improve visibility in various other search results sets as well, such as map listings, videos, the knowledge graph, and more.

The SEO industry is expected to reach $80 Billion by 2020, according to a report by Borrell Associates that produces advertising reports. The whopping number is for businesses in the U.S. alone.

Why is SEO Important?

Every website wants to reach its audience, but the internet is flooded with web pages. Search engines need to rank among pages to present the best result among the web pages.

SEO is the way to optimize your web page on the factors which are used by Search Engines for Ranking. If your web pages are not SEO friendly, then there are very fewer chances of your web page reaching your audience.

Creating good content is not only a critical factor but optimizing it is a crucial factor so that the search engine identifies it as a useful and relevant page.

Hence, SEO is very important if you want to reach your audience as there are very less chances that your audience will even scroll through the 2nd page of the result.

But the question is – how do you optimize your content for SEO and what “Ranking factors” actually matter?

To answer that, we first need to have a look at how search engines works.

How does SEO Work?

how does seo work- netilly blog

Search engines like Google use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from one site to another, gathering the information about the content on those pages, and putting them in a web index. This index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query,taking into account hundreds of ranking factors, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query Google (or any other search engine) score their search results based mainly upon relevancy and authority of pages it has crawled and included – every detail it crawled through- in its web index.  That index is fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with user queries to provide the best answer.

Google uses a cluster of ranking factors in its algorithm to score their search results and uses a hyperlink based algorithm, PageRank, to calculate the popularity and authority of a page. This is still a fundamental factor in ranking even though Google is far more sophisticated today. As a matter of  fact, Google keeps updating its algorithm as the behaviour of people changes.

SEO further encompasses technical and creative activities to influence and improve some of those known ranking factors. SEO also includes actions to help improve the number and quality of “inbound links” to a website from other sites.

Relevant and renowned websites linking to a site is a strong signal to Google that it might be of interest to its users. This also signifies that the website having backlinks as ‘authoritative’ and can be trusted to appear in the search results for relevant queries.

How do Search Engines crawl through a web page?

The principal aim of a search engine is to show relevant content to the user, and it filters content based on relevancy. Every search engine has its own algorithm to find the most relevant page.

Every Search Engine performs a few main tasks:

1. Crawling– It is the first step that any search engine performs. In this, the page is read thoroughly by search engines, and the content is examined.

2. Indexing– After crawling a webpage, the search engine stores and parses data for its own use later on, the process of of indexing is identifying the words that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

3. Processing – When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

4. Calculating Relevancy – More than one page likely contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

5. Retrieving Results – The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best-matched results. This is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

6.Ranking – This is the process in which the search engine ranks data based on several SEO factors to put the most relevant content at the top.

For e.g., – a user searches for dog training on Google. So first, Google will crawl all the web pages related to Dog Training. Then it will Index the web pages in its directory based on their relevancy.

After Indexing, it will rank pages, and here is where SEO plays its part. The Web Page, which is SEO friendly has more chances of getting a higher rank than which are not.

What are the Activities involved in SEO?

SEO activities are often grouped into “Onsite SEO” and “Offsite SEO.” These two categories split practices that can be performed on a website and away from a site.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO, also known as On-Page SEO, refers to technical activities to improve organic visibility within the website. This broadly means optimizing the site and content itself to improve the relevancy, accessibility, and experience for users. These are the changes that are made on a website directly to get a higher ranking on a search engine. Some of the typical activities (though not the complete list) include –

1.Keyword – Keywords are words or phrases which are searched through search engines. Keywords are essential from an SEO perspective. It is an important ranking factor for any Web Page or Website. If the right keywords are used, your webpage can rank on the top of any search engine, but to do this, Keyword Research is a critical task. It helps to get insight into what our audience is looking for and what it wants. There are many Keyword Planner tools you can use to research your keywords online.

Keyword Planning is a very strategic task, and some factors should be kept in mind while doing Keyword Research such as Volume, Relevancy, and Competition.

While Using Keywords, one should be aware not to stuff the web page with unnecessary keywords otherwise search engines might spam that page.

2.URL’sAn SEO friendly URL structure is a significant factor in On-Page SEO Ranking. Try to incorporate your Keywords in Your URL also for better Ranking. Your URL should be relevant to your services offered and should be easy to read for Search Engines.

3.Structuring of the Website and Technical Aspects- A website is the representation of any business. People are likely to judge a company based on their Website. The Structure of a website is a very Important SEO Ranking Factor. It usually takes a user 4 seconds to judge a website. A good website should be the right combination of a user’s needs and the company’s services.

Ensuring the website can be crawled and indexed and is free from errors or user experience barriers.

4.Headings – Headings are the key elements of a structured website. Headings help the search engine to crawl more easily and tells the search engine what a page is about.

People also prefer to read a web page that has proper headings as it is easier to navigate and easy to understand.

5.Image Optimization – Images are an essential aspect of a website. Images help to make web pages attractive and give a more precise layout. But just putting a relevant image is not enough.

One also needs to optimize the URL of the image and the size of the image. Images which are too big take time to load and lowers the ranking on SERPs

6.Tags and Meta description – Meta tags and title tags help a search engine know about your web page. These tags will not be visible on the web page. These tags will be visible on the code of the page. These tags give search engines more insight to a web page and help to determine whether the page is relevant to the user search or not. Meta descriptions and titles are important ones. The search engine uses these to form the search engine results. Therefore they are very important.

The title is the result that is shown, and the meta descriptions are the lines that follow. A proper meta description is usually 2-3 lines, which contain the keyword or the phrase of the title also. An appropriate meta description can also have a call to action.

7.Internal Links – Internal links are links to a website within. Internal links help the users to navigate better and more efficiently within the site. Links carry a lot of weight. The more internally linked your website is, the more the search engine can determine the rank and read the keywords. By including internal links, search engines crawl better and update the ranks accordingly.

8.Content Optimization – We have heard that content is the king, and it is right. Without good content, you cannot engage your users on your web page. You content should demonstrate data that establishes subject expertise, authority, and trust, and ultimately provides an excellent user experience.

Always remember that the content is for the users and write content keeping their intent and perspective in mind. Don’t stuff technical jargon and try to explain things in a simple manner.

Use Primary and Secondary Keywords in your content, keeping in attention the placement of keywords and keywords density. Your content is the ultimate deciding factor of whether a user will stay on your page or leave it.

9.Mobile Responsiveness – Make sure that your website loads fast and with the proper layout on mobile phones as well. More and more mobile users are using their phones to search for a query, and you need to ensure that your site loads fast and with proper UI on mobile as well.

There are many tools you can use to see whether your website loads the same on mobile or not.

Offsite SEO

Offsite SEO, also known as Off-Page SEO, refers to creative activities carried outside of a website to improve organic visibility. This aims to increase the number of reputable links from other domains hence often mentioned as ‘link building,’ as search engines use them as scoring for trustworthiness.

Quality links from websites and pages with more trust, popularity, and relevancy pass more value to another domain than an unknown poor webpage that isn’t trusted by search engines.

Some of the typical activities include

1.Digital PR– Strong PR provides reasons for other websites to talk and link to your domain. This might be internal news flow, writing for external publications, original research, expert interviews, quotes, and much more.

2. Outreach & Promotion– This involves communicating with key journalists, influencers, bloggers, or webmasters about a brand, resource, or content to gain coverage and ultimately earn links to a website

3.Building Links- The web pages which have a good number of links from websites having competent domain authority and trust have more SEO score and are likely to rank higher on SERP’s. The more quality, relevant sites that link to your website, the higher your position in search engine results will be. If the site won’t send any visitors, or the audience is entirely irrelevant and unrelated, then it might not be a link that’s worth pursuing.

4.Social Bookmarking- Social Bookmarking is an excellent way to share content and build domain authority. Bookmarking on sites with good domain authority can increase your SEO score and give more traffic to your website as well.

5.Social Media Marketing- Social Media Marketing has become a marketing essential. Social media presents immense potential to reach the audience and grow as a brand. It is one of the best mediums to generate leads and gain visitors to your website.

These are some of the factors of Off-Site SEO, but the list has more elements in it.

Before we conclude, let’s quickly look at different approaches for SEO- black hat and white hat.

White-Hat SEO, Black-Hat SEO, and Gray-Hat SEO

There are two significant approaches to SEO – White-Hat SEO (the ‘good’ kind), and Black-Hat SEO (the ‘shady’ kind). There are, of course, differing opinions about the nature of each of these SEO approaches.

It’s essential to remember link schemes such as buying links, exchanging links excessively, or low-quality articles that aim to manipulate rankings- falls into the category of Black-Hat SEO. These are against Google’s guidelines, and strict action can be taken by penalizing a website.

The best and most sustainable approach is White-Hat SEO. The best way to improve the inbound links to your website is by earning them rather than buying them. This can be achieved by providing genuine and compelling reasons for sites to cite and link to your brand for who you are, the service or product you offer, or the content you create.

There is another SEO practice called Gray-hat SEO, which is riskier than White-Hat SEO, but may or may not result in your site being banned from the search engine(s). This may involve tactics that are ill-defined and could improve your site’s ranking without negative consequences.

But it’s not wise to get on Google’s wrong side, and if you aren’t sure whether a given method violates Google’s guidelines or not, it’s best to avoid that tactic.

Conclusion

Investing in SEO can return an exceptional ROI compared to other types of marketing and promotion. However, it takes three to six months of an ongoing effort for results to come through and requires continuous analytics monitoring.

SEO activities require expertise to carry them though they can also be learned. The other option is to hire professional SEO experts (like Netilly) to help you out.

If you’d like to discuss how SEO can help your business or brand, then please drop us an email or leave your contact details and we will be happy to schedule a free consultation with one of our SEO Specialists.

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