7 Smart Tips to Boost SEO Rankings and Traffic

Many people consider SEO as being tricky and high SEO rankings hard to achieve.

But the truth is that Google loves you and wants you to give you good SEO rankings because this way Google gets more income through advertising.

However, Google likes to rank higher good content that it’s easy to read and relevant so people continue to use the search engine.

That is why you need to put a little effort into your SEO to make Google trust you before sending a crazy amount of traffic your way.

It’s just a little effort and this little effort will become very easy a part of your workflow.

Once part of your workflow you will see how your SEO rankings and traffic will boost and your audience will grow.

But before that, you need to learn the process and these smart tips that will help you boost SEO rankings and traffic.

1. Get it Right from Start

I know that you’ve heard this a lot while building your website, getting started with SEO, diving into Google Analytics and even when you started your business, but it’s true:

You need to get it right from the start!

By this I am referring at the fact that you need to understand the SEO process, prepare the tools that will make your job 1 million times easier and setup goals for what you want to achieve.

Additionally you need to have a clean design with nice fonts that makes articles easy to read, uses a smart theme (if you are on WordPress) with good coding that Google loves.

a. Understand the process

Again, this is not a hard process but you need to know why you are doing this, how search engines work and how you can achieve good SEO rankings in search engines.

But, by the time you will finish reading this article you will have these clear.

b. Use smart tools to make your job easier

There are tons of tools out there and there are a lot really good tools, but you need to use the best tools to make your job easier so you can focus on what’s really important.

That is why I will list here the tools that I use and consider the most important for your SEO efforts:

Moz – You can get a lot with a PRO account of Moz, but most important, you can create a campaign that you can track, research the keywords that you should target, see keyword rankings, link your Google Analytics account and see what is the ranking of a keyword and how many visits that keyword sends to your site and much more.

On top of this you can get access to a Q&A Forum, Webinars, 2011 MozCon Videos and additional tools.

One really neat tool that I frequently use is the Keyword Difficulty tool, which shows me how difficult is to rank for a specific keyword and whether or not I should target it.

You can get a lot more with a Moz PRO account, but I will address that in a different article.

Open Site Explorer – This tool will help you see who links to your website and how authoritative those sites are.

But, you can actually use this to research your competitors and see where they get links from, where they do guest posts or what anchor text they target.

Then you can use these to improve your link building strategy and get more links from website with a high authority.

Advanced Web Ranking – With Advanced Web Ranking you can actually achieve great things, and monitor your SEO rankings, links and traffic.

While Moz is an online based tool, Advanced Web Ranking can be installed on your computer and it will help you to easily track your keyword rankings, monitor the backlinks of your website and connect it to Google Analytics to see data about your traffic.

What’s also interested about Advanced Web Ranking is the fact that you can do all these for your competitors and discover their SEO strategy.

Read my Advanced Web Ranking review to learn more about how it can help you.

Scribe SEO – I use Scribe SEO for all my articles and it helps me to get most of them on the first page of Google within days from publishing or even hours sometimes.

What I like most about it is the fact that once I write the article, I can analyze it and Scribe will immediately score it to tell me how effective I optimized the article.

It allows me to do some small edits and increase the chances for the article to rank higher before I even publish it.

I highly recommend it! Get your copy now!

Google Analytics – I’ve been talking a lot about Google Analytics in the past 6 months because analyzing and understanding your visitors is really important.

With Google Analytics you will be able to see how many visitors come to your site from search engines and what keywords they use.

If you are eager to learn more, signup for my free Google Analytics course or take it at the next level and get my Web Analytics Blueprint paid course.

c. Setup Goals

Always, always setup goals when starting a new project. In this case you can have as a goal a specific ranking for your keywords, a targeted number of links to your site or visitors that come to your site from search engines.

Personally, I set as a goal for my articles to rank fast and then get on the first page of Google.

Sometimes they do get there and sometimes they don’t, depending on how competitive the keyword is.

If they are on the first page I already have a boost in traffic and all I have to do to get them higher on the page is just increase my site authority.

2. Research and Target your Keywords

Once you understand the process, and have the tools ready and your goals clear, it’s time to move at the next step.

Now, you need to think about the keywords that you want to target.

To do this you need to use the Google Keyword Research Tool, type in some keywords to start with and discover the ones that you need to target.

Read more about the process on the step 1 (Do your Research) from the How to choose a domain name article.

Additionally, I would recommend you to get a Moz PRO account and use their Keyword Difficulty tool to better analyze your targeted keywords. It’s free for 30 days.

Keyword research is also important because it helps you create magnetic headlines. They are important because they can make people share your articles or not.

3. Improve On Page SEO

The are a couple of important things that you need to focus on when writing the copy of your article/pages.

First you need to make sure that you write for people, not for search engines, because you will get the attention of your audience. They will know that you are genuine.

Also, the search engines are smart enough to see when you over optimize your copy.

Second, use the keywords that you researched on the second step and place them naturally in your article. Just by knowing them from your research your brain will automatically place them where they are appropriate.

So even if you’re not a keyword research genius do the steps I recommended in the How to choose a domain name article and you will see how natural you will place those keywords in your articles.

Do that before starting to write.

Next you need to make sure that you set a proper meta title and meta description for your articles/pages because they are your secret weapon for good SEO rankings.

They are important because the meta title and description are part your first “meeting” with a potential visitor and you wan to make a good first impression.

While searching on Google your potential visitors will see the meta title and meta description before even landing on your website.

Read more about this on the On Page Optimization section within the SEO 101: Keywords, Ranking, Links and Analytics article.

4. Analyze Before you Publish

Just as I mentioned above, with Scribe SEO you get the chance to see how your article scores before you even publish it.

And this is important. Really important.

This way you will be sure that when Google will come to index your articles, they will get a good score from start.

Next, all you have to do is just build some authority and your article will improve its SEO rankings and it will be boosted on the first page of Google.

To do this just get a Scribe SEO license, install the plugin on your site or use the web tool to analyze other pages and start analyzing your articles before you publish them.

Scribe SEO will tell you what you did right and what you did wrong, so next time you will not make the same mistake again.

Once you start to use it regularly you will see that your articles will score 100% from the first analysis because your subconscious will learn the rules and it will not let you do the same mistakes over and over again.

5. Build Authority Links – Off Page SEO

Authority is something that Google likes and it will give you good SEO rankings if it sees you as an authority.

You can start building this authority by asking your friends to link to your site. Now almost everyone has a site and every link counts even if it’s from a site with low authority.

Next, in order to get links and traffic, make sure that you optimize your social media profiles.

Sites like Google+ and About.me allows you to have backlinks to your site that send link juice and improve your rankings.

Once you do this basic link building, you can move at the next level and start commenting on other people’s articles.

This can send back link juice from blogs who have a dofollow policy and traffic if your comments are compelling enough.

Finally, you will need to move into guest posting, which is the best way of building links from authoritative websites.

You can get links back to your articles and landing pages of your website.

6. Add Social Media in the Mix

Social Media can really help you boost your SEO rankings, especially since Google and Bing confirmed that Twitter and Facebook influences SEO.

Additional experiments have shown that Twitter and Google+ influence SEO rankings.

But getting started with Social Media and using it effectively is a really broad topic and beyond the scope of this article.

However, here are some resources to keep you busy:

• The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Twitter Marketing
• 34 Google+ Resources for Your Business: Advice from the Pros

7. Track, Analyse and Repeat

Once you get through all these steps and also while you are doing them, you need to track and measure your results.

This way you will see what works and what doesn’t, so you can know where to focus next time.

There are a couple of ways to measure the results of your SEO campaigns:

• SEO Rankings
• Traffic

You can check your rankings with a Moz PRO account weekly or with Advanced Web Ranking any time you want.

In terms of analyzing the traffic that comes from search engines you can do it with Google Analytics by looking at the traffic sources.

Additionally, you can also get yourself a Google Webmaster Tools account to view additional insights about your visitors.

What’s next?

Finally you will need to take action!

Leave a comment below to let us know that you are ready to take action and ask for help if you need it.

Once you do that schedule some time in your calendar every day, week or month to research more and do the steps outlined above.

Then come back and report your achievements. It will be fun. Let’s do it!