SEO for Bloggers: 48 Experts Share their Best Website Optimization Tips

Our tip is to conduct detailed keyword research to optimize your blog posts. Find the most relevant keywords, with the highest search volumes, related to your subject. Then think of ways to make substantive additions to your blog post which address those related keywords.

To be clear, it is important to not simply include the related keywords in the blog post (i.e. keyword stuffing). Rather, an effort must be made to include substantive discussions in the post which address the questions underlying each of the related keywords. By doing this, the blog post has the greatest chance of ranking well for multiple high volume keywords and getting as much exposure as possible.

Jessica Rose, Chief Executive Officer of Copper H2O, a 100% female run e-commerce social enterprise in the health and wellness industry. They started in 2015 and have extensive experience with SEO.

If you are looking to get your blog to rank organically in Google, you need to find the best keyword phrase that fits your topic in mind. 

Depending on the current authority of the website you’re writing for, you should be investigating keyword phrases that have low to medium search volume, but also haven’t already been targeted in Google. 

Use a keyword volume tool (a free one is Ubersuggest) and search for phrases related to your blog content. Usually longer keyword phrases are going to be your best 
chance, as while they have lower search volume, they have less direct competition in search results. 

Matt Bassos is head of SEO for Vuly Play Australia. He provides top-level SEO strategies for the company’s trampoline and outdoor play 
equipment division. 

Start with long tail keywords which account for at least 5 to 6 words. This can easily be done by using a tool like Ahrefs. Simply go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and submit your seed keyword such as, weight loss, then head over to viewing all possible keywords. In the new window set the 
keyword difficulty from 0 to 10 and word count from 4 to max and BOOM, you 
will have hundreds of easy to rank high volume keywords. 

By only working with long-tail and low difficulty keywords newcomers can ensure they get a level playing field. This allows them to stay motivated and get drip feed traffic, which they can scale later when they grow. 

Farasat Khan is a Digital Marketer and is primarily responsible for Outreach campaigns, Keyword research, Technical SEO, On page analysis and everything SEO. He is an SEO Specialist at IsItWP

My tip for SEO is to include secondary keywords that are related to your primary keyword that you are targeting. The secondary keyword does not specifically need to be in an H1, H2, etc and you do not need to list it multiple times.

As long as you have the specific secondary keywords somewhere in your article, there is a chance you can rank for that secondary keyword as well. Contrary to what many think, your article will most likely bring in more traffic from secondary keywords that you did not originally target. 

Melissa Teng is a Seattle-based travel blogger and creative, who is passionate about seeing as much of the world as possible while helping others do the same on her blog, Wit and Folly.

A core step for good SEO is keyword research and one thing that is often overlooked is that search volume is becoming less relevant, because Google 
offers so many featured snippets and rich results before you ever see the first traditional organic search result.

Therefore, click data is rapidly becoming more important and you need to be using a tool that provides that data. As an example, there are 6,9k searches a month for Tom Hanks age, but Google just tells you the age (63 years) in a featured snippet. This leads to only 757 clicks per month on any search results for this query. This is key information to know what keywords to optimize for page for. 

Denny Putsh  is a professional SEO and lifelong golf enthusiast, always interested  in learning the next trick or tip. On his blog he enjoys sharing his knowledge and recommendations, with his end goal being to get more folks excited about the game he loves so much. He is Chief Editor of Hitting the Golf Ball.

Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO. Therefore every blogger needs to know how to conduct keyword research and keyword optimization in order to publish articles about popular topics in their niches.

Using keyword research tools such as Google keyword planner reveals the most searched queries in Google for a particular topic and includes valuable data like search volume and seasonality.

Once a list of keywords is decided for a 
given blog topic, bloggers must optimize their articles by using the keywords in prominent places such as in the title, headings, within the body of the article and also tagged to images.

Sean Begg Flint is the founder of Position Digital, a digital marketing agency for ambitious start-ups and growing brands. They help companies get found online through SEO, creative content and targeted outreach. 

According to Search Engine Journal, it’s important to understand the search intention behind the keyword that you’re optimizing for. To find out what the search intention is, google the keyword and analyze the top ranking pages.

These pages are ranking because they match the search intention of Googlers and thus, should be used as a basis for your content. 

For example, an article about how to bathe a hamster should go straight to the point to talk about the methods and steps to bathe a hamster. It’d be best to avoid going deep into miscellaneous subtopics. Even though the article may be shorter than usual, it’s okay as long as it meets the search intention.

Bernice Quek is the SEO Specialist of Orbital Fusion Technologies, a supplier of AXXAIR orbital welding machines. 

The #1 most important SEO tip for bloggers is to match the intent of the searcher for your target keyword and blog post. You can do everything else right with regard to SEO, but if you fail to match your article to the intent of the searcher, you will never rank.

For example, if I target “online courses” with an article about creating online courses for an online business, I’m never going to rank. Why? Because Google knows the intent of people who search for that keyword is to find online college courses and Udemy type courses. Always start by assessing the intent and planning your article to match it or you’ll fail before you even begin. 

Kevin Geary is the founder of DigitalAmbition.co, an online marketing and business platform as well as the Chief Operating Officer at a graphic design and digital marketing agency in Atlanta.

Know what your readers are searching for. We’re not just writing to fulfil a business goal — we’re writing to help our target customers. Their questions should fuel our content. Before you even start outlining your blog or ebook content, use Answer The Public. 

It’s simple: You just type a keyword on Answer The Public search bar, say, “content marketing”. It shows you all of the phrases and questions people are asking around that keyword. You can even use it to structure your content outline, enabling you to create better-focused content that will most likely be read and referenced. And that’s a brownie point for your SEO. 

Shiela Pantaleon is Chief Content Officer at Thought Alchemists. She helps world-changers bring out the gold in their message so they resonate with their target audience. Through inbound marketing and a keen eye for structure, style, and story, she develops content strategies and produces thought leadership content. 

For an instant increase in my traffic and ranks and to save hours of my time, I use SurferSEO. 

Surfer SEO is a cloud-based on-page optimization tool that allows you to 
analyze and compare your own pages against what currently ranks in the SERPs. Instead of trying to guess what Google likes to rank, this tool offers you a data-driven analysis of exactly what’s missing from your content. 

This tool analyzes over 500 SEO ranking factors that help you rank better for your keywords and as you’d expect, a boost in traffic. Along with this, you get Competitive content analysis, Word count LSI & partial keywords, TF-IDF keyword analysis, Meta titles, Site speed comparisons, Alt tags, 
and hundreds more SERP similarity factors! 

Muhammad Mateen Khan is a Digital Marketing Strategist. He loves to code, travel, read and occasionally writes to spread his knowledge via blogs and discussions. 

Do Competitor Research. Check their domain authority for free on Moz. Look up their backlinks for free on Ahrefs. Then you can create a strategy to beat them in search rankings. Try to get backlinks from the blogs and sites that are linking to them. 

David Pike is the founder of the New York Trolley Company. He is also the author of “The New Startup: A Modern Guide to Launching a Business Quickly And with Minimal cost”.

My favorite SEO tip that has always allowed me to rank and grow my traffic is to ignore random keyword searching techniques and focus on what my competitors are ranking for. 

To do this I use a keyword research software like SEMrush or Ahrefs and type in the domain name of my competitor in the domain overview section. Once all of the information loads up, you need to scroll down and go to the ‘top organic keywords’ section. 

Once you get there you should see all of the keywords that your competition is ranking for and if they ranking for these keywords, there is a good chance you can too. You simply need to create better, longer, and more thorough content. 

When you are selecting which competitors to compete with, make sure you choose websites that are in your niche and have a similar DA score. 

Freya Kuka, is a personal finance blogger, and founder of Collecting Cents. She has been featured on publications such as Business Insider, Finance101, and Money Done Right.

My top SEO tip for bloggers is to define the structure of their content library prior to getting started.

Over time, the blogger should build out a comprehensive library of high-quality content that addresses visitor needs at different levels of the conversion funnel. However, if the blogger does not do the proper customer and keyword research prior to getting started, he or she will likely prioritize creation of the wrong content and 
use a suboptimal website architecture.

By mapping out the content library, the blogger can identify all related topics with high search volume. Over time, this will allow Google to trust the site as an authoritative source in their domain, which results in organic search traffic, increased 
awareness, and new customers. 

Bruce Hogan is Co-Founder & CEO of SoftwarePundit, a technology research firm that provides advice, information, and tools to help businesses successfully adopt technology. 

A great piece of advice for SEOs and bloggers is to have a consistent, planned content strategy that you stick to. The main benefit of an overall, consistent blog content strategy is that you will retain readers.

It is rare to get people returning to blogs these days due to oversaturation. But the ones that people do subscribe to are those that produce content they know the readers are interested in.

Think of magazines – if a football magazine didn’t stick to the football it wouldn’t 
have the returning readers that it does. But they do subscribe because they know what they will get. As long as you plan out your posts to make sure your content is on-brand and relevant to your niche you, should reap the benefits of consistent returning traffic.

Louis Watton is the marketing executive for Shiply. He has been working in the world of digital marketing and SEO for the last 3 years.

When it comes to SEO for blogging, there are several steps to follow to increase search engine visibility. First, publish often, meaning every 2-3 days. Second, publish posts that are at least 1,500+ words in length. Google likes to see long-form content and consistently ranks it higher. Third, use images to break up the content and help the reader.

Next, share your content on all social media channels to increase exposure. Lastly, use 
Clearscope.io to grade your articles and don’t publish anything that is not A+.

The key is to produce better content than your competitors, and if you’re able to do that, Google will reward you by ranking your site higher in search results. 

Kevin Miller is the founder and CEO of The Word Counter, with an extensive background in SEO, paid acquisition and email marketing. Kevin studied at Georgetown University, worked at Google for several years, is a Forbes contributor and has been a head of growth and marketing at several top tier startups in Silicon Valley. 

My biggest SEO tip for bloggers is content, content, content. Just keep writing awesome, valuable content that your target audience will love, based on long-tail keywords, and your organic traffic will just keep growing.

The more content you create (as long as it provides value and is unique), the more traffic you will drive. 

Matthew Tudge is Digital Marketing Manager at WDA Automotive Marketing. He is an all round digital marketing expert with over 8 years of 
experience in the industry. His marketing experience covers SEO, Content, Social Media, Email Marketing, PPC, CRO and Marketing Automation.

My best advice for bloggers is simple: be thorough with your content. One of the major ranking factors that you have direct control over is the content on your blog. It’s up to you to ensure high quality content that is thorough enough to deserve to rank at the top of the SERPs. 

To be thorough you need to make sure that your content provides the information that the user is looking for. If you don’t provide that information, you won’t show up at the top of the search results. 

If you start creating thorough and high quality blog posts you’ll see better results and more importantly, you’ll see an increase in traffic as your content will start ranking for many different keywords as well. 

Lars Iversen  is spreading the word about the open source CMS Umbraco through search engine marketing. On the side he runs his own digital marketing blog in Danish and is focusing on getting organic traffic through Google. 

Here is my top tip on SEO for blogging: Get comfortable with writing long-form content that covers all aspects of your topic. Think 1,500 – 2,500 words.

Not only is long form content proven to rank higher in Google, your readers will tend to trust you more as you demonstrate your expertise. They will also linger on your blog for a longer time as they scroll through, digesting all of your content, which sends a positive signal to Google that readers like your content.

It’s like a positive feedback loop. The more time they spend on your blog, the higher it’s going to rank in Google. 

Gabriela Covay is the founder and CEO of Bright Valley Marketing, a woman-owned digital marketing agency in Sacramento, California. Her agency focuses on SEO, content marketing, and search advertising.

Best Advice on SEO for Bloggers: Always go for length over frequency. Put another way, the number of words in blog posts matters more than how many times you post in a week. 

We’ve consistently seen longer blog posts outperform multiple posts on the same topic that cumulatively add up to the same number of words. This does not mean that you should dilute content by just adding fluff in order to meet a word requirement.

Don’t sacrifice quality. But all things being 
equal, spend more energy writing one long, deep-dive post rather than a number of small ones. We generally aim for at least 2000 words. 

Sunny Ashley is the founder of Autoshopinvoice, provider of modern, cloud-based shop management software for independent auto repair shops and garages.

Word count is important. In a recent study, in which Backlinko analysed 11.8 million Google search results, they found that the word count of pages and blog articles was evenly distributed amongst the top 10 in the SERPs. 

The average Google first page result contains 1,447 words. That doesn’t 
guarantee that an 1,448 word blog article will automatically rank well, but there is a known correlation between word count and rankings. This is largely because quality long-form content tends to be best for link 
building, conversion rates, and social media engagement.

Just keep in mind that long-form content still needs a solid keyword strategy, a great title, and distribution — otherwise it won’t get you there. 

Alice Bedward, Digital Marketing Specialist at Flyparks 

Write for people, not for robots. Yes, Google, Bing, etc. search based on keywords and a lot of other factors. However, if you make your content relevant to your user base, you’ll be rewarded with better results. 

Search engines try to understand intent when someone is looking for a website. If your copy is written in a way that answers questions or maybe provokes thought, that webpage is more likely to be served up on page one.

The user experience trumps almost everything. If your readership finds your content easy to navigate and it’s meaningful, then almost all of your metrics will improve.

Raymer Malone runs High Income Protection an insurance agency that is 100% online and focuses on organic SEO for client acquisition. He owns several websites where clients can get quotes and apply for various types of coverage. Raymer has been in the financial services industry for over 20 years. 

My #1 best piece of advice for SEO is to stick to writing about what you love. I’ve written plenty of long-form pieces that hit the right keywords in the right places, but if it’s not a topic you’re passionate about, it comes through in the writing.

Sometimes writing to hit keywords means someone will find your website, get the answer to their question quickly, then leave – leaving you with nothing but a high bounce rate. Always choose quality over quantity of content or keywords and phrases. 

Amy Poulton is a bookish backpacker and British bookpacker who has called Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico and now Thailand home. She writes about exploring real and fictional worlds on her blog, Page Traveller . 

Open Google Search console and open the Performance report. Click Pages, then select one of your top-performing pages. This will create a filter to show you only data for this page. Next, click Queries and you’ll see a list of all the keywords that are driving traffic to that page. 

Now, go to your page editor (in WordPress or whatever CMS you use) and edit that article so that it includes all (or most) of the keywords from the list in Google Search Console. Add them naturally, not in a spammy or weird-sounding way. You want them to read totally naturally. 

Doing this will make your content more authoritative and thorough to Google, and will help that page rank better and for more keywords. 

Jayson DeMers is an entrepreneur, business owner, and SEO specialist. He is a columnist for Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, where he covers SEO, marketing & entrepreneurship. Jayson is the founder & CEO of EmailAnalytics a productivity tool that visualizes your email activity.

My number one SEO tip for bloggers is to focus on rewrites and edits. It’s very important to publish a large quantity of content, but if your large quantity of content has poor SEO quality, your blog isn’t going to go anywhere. If you have time to write five posts in a week, turn three of them into updates instead of brand new posts.

Go into Google Search Console and find the blogs that are teetering on the edge of success (like posts that are ranking on page two that you want to push to page one) and work on ramping them up with new/better keywords, more length, more images, etc. It 
may seem tedious, but you’ll be grateful for it later. 

Anastasia Iliou is the Marketing Manager at Rain, an employee financial wellness benefit provider. Anastasia focuses on content management, SEO, and lead generation. 

Drop the schedule. Posting schedules are great if you have got the resources to keep it up. A dedicated content team can drive quality and  timing. For most bloggers, this driving both at once is quite a task.

To stand out in a sea of low effort blog posts, you need to win people with quality. Only well-researched and well-written posts allow you to build up a strong fanbase. Posting quickly put together articles to keep the schedule won’t do the trick. Rather spend four weeks on a post worth reading than four hours on a piece of content barely worth posting. Quality content is king. 

Peter Thaleikis  is a software engineer and marketer. He runs Bring Your Own Ideas Ltd, software development company. He blogs at PeterThaleikis.Com

One of the most essential aspects of enhancing your blog posts for SEO 
comprises maintaining your blog post’s relevance by keeping it up to date. 

Updating blog posts entails a variety of strategies, including adding internal links, incorporating novel information, targeting existing and new keywords, including new optimized images, etc. This process will improve your pages’ visibility in SERPS – as search engines, including Google, prioritize providing the latest information to searchers. 

Bill Joseph is an entrepreneur and founder of Frontier Blades, a company dedicated to facilitating and motivating individuals to explore amazing outdoor experiences by introducing them to the proper equipment. Additionally, as an outdoor enthusiast, Bill enjoys participating in hiking  activities with his family. 

If I had to give you one piece of advice on SEO it would be this: Make sure your website looks good on all devices, especially on mobiles. It’s as simple as that.

Most of the websites are built using a desktop computer and often aren’t tested on other devices. Whereas, the vast majority of the websites that you see on Google today have been indexed using a mobile-first procedure. It means that Google’s bot will crawl and index your website based on how it looks on a mobile device.

Samuel Fletcher has been working in the digital marketing field for over 10 years. He has successfully built, ranked and later sold websites for 6-digit figures. He is a Digital Marketing Specialist at SupplyGem

A great SEO tip for bloggers is to focus more on mobile. In September 2020, Google will switch all websites to mobile-first indexing. This means Google will increase the focus on mobile user experience to evaluate websites for SEO.

A good way to prepare yourself is to use Google PageSpeed Insights to check and make your site is more mobile friendly and so, get more organic traffic. 

Erico Franco is an Electrical Engineer and Inbound Marketing Manager at Agencia de Marketing Digital

My #1 SEO tip for bloggers is to utilize a content strategy called topic cluster, a term coined by Hubspot. 

According to HubSpot, topic clusters are groups of related web pages that all link to one core pillar page. Organizing your site content into clusters helps search engines distinguish your area of expertise and better understand the relationship between these pages. 

A pillar page is a page that covers all aspects of the topic, or what refers to as the parent topic. Other contents that link to the pillar page is called supporting content. This SEO strategy works so well because search engines like Google have now shifted from keyword-based ranking to topic-based ranking. The more you can cover any topic, the more you will be viewed as an expert on that topic, and thus, can help you rank higher. 

Jackie Owen is a professional web developer and online marketer, specializing in WordPress development and SEO. He is the founder of Techjackie.com, an online marketing agency in Thailand, and a blog providing knowledge about digital marketing. 

A highly valuable strategy to improve your rankings is to develop silo structures on your website. “Silos” are “parent-pages”, basically main pages with a general overview of information. These silos link to “child pages”, which go into a lot more detail – and always link back to the parent page. 

If e.g. you’re a travel blogger, one parent page could be about Thailand, talking about culture, food, history and so on. Each of these topics gets a child page with a lot more detailed information. That helps:

a) with internal linking (Google loves internal linking!);
b) with outreach, as you can e.g. contact foodies with your child page about food, even if they’re not Thailand enthusiasts (yet). 

Chris Kaiser  is an internationally known marketing consultant and sales trainer. He has lived and worked on 5 continents to date. He currently focuses on growing Click A Tree, realizing his vision to make sustainability simple – both for individuals and companies. 

Internal links won’t substitute real backlinks from third-party websites, but they matter more than bloggers usually think. Google confirmed this by stating that their bots do pay attention to both the number of internal links a page has and their anchor texts. 

That’s why it’s always a good idea to add a few internal links to every newly published article. Just search for relevant content among your older publications and pick informative anchor text. They will jump-start your fresh articles, help them get indexed faster, and give search engines a better understanding of what those articles are about.

Anastasiia Khlystova is a content marketing manager at HelpCrunch, an all-in-one customer communication platform. Her professional experience encompasses SEO and link building strategies. 

The most crucial tip for SEO in 2020 is Social Media. Social signals that include the totality of webpage’s likes, shares, and overall social media visibility in the eyes of search engine crawlers indicate the interaction of people on your brand’s content on social media. 

The collaboration of SEO and social media together give audience relevance and value, both directly and indirectly. Similarly, the more people engaging with your content through social media, the higher your page SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking. I make sure to add a social share widget on my page to allow users to share my content on social sites which directly impacts Google rankings. 

Rameez Ghayas Usmani is currently working as a Digital Marketing Executive for PureVPN.  He loves to travel, read books, and occasionally writes to spread his knowledge via blogs and discussions. 

My best SEO advice for bloggers is to add social sharing buttons to your blog posts. This can easily be done with plugins in WordPress.

Social sharing buttons allow users to easily share posts that they find interesting, which will increase your visibility. By increasing visibility, this also increases the possibility of earning links to your blog posts,  which will help improve your SEO. 

Allison Chaney is a recognized expert in digital marketing, contributing to the book “Digital Marketing that Actually Works” and speaking to global  audiences. Allison has also created internationally accredited digital marketing training programs. Allison is Chief Digital Training Officer at Boot Camp Digital.

Pinterest. On pingroupie.com, research group boards that focus on the same topic as your blog. Then contact the admins of these group boards and ask to be added as a pinner. You may have to dig to track down some of these admins, and some may say no or simply not respond, but a few will say yes.

Some of these group boards have tens of thousands of followers, maximizing your 
reach. Create a Pinterest-friendly graphic for each post (Canva.com makes this easy) and pin to the group boards. I’ve gotten many backlinks from other websites as a result of using group boards on Pinterest. 

Bryn Donovan is an author, an optimist, and a blogger at bryndonovan.com. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and in her day job, she heads up editorial for Hallmark Publishing. She lives in Los Angeles. 

Remove anything that slows your site down. A slow page leads to poor user experience and ultimately discourages people from buying your product. Data from Strange Loop shows that a mere 1-second delay in page load time can yield a whopping 7% loss in conversions.

That is why it is important to optimize your images. Make them smaller to ensure that you are not wasting precious bandwidth and space. Put only necessary information so that the page loads immediately. Lastly, make your homepage the fastest loading page on your website. 

Samantha Moss is Editor and Content Ambassador of Romantific. She shares her insights on topics such as dating, relationships, digital marketing, social media and more. 

Effective SEO strategies are crucial to achieving optimal success in your blogging career. Here is the best SEO advice I recommend for bloggers: Optimize your images and videos so Google or other search engine bots can understand the content of the image and how it relates to your overall content. This strategy will tell search engine bots how relevant and cohesive your content is.

Images and videos used in your blog content should enhance the material and the readers’ experience, as well. 

To be SEO friendly, opt for high-quality original photos. If this isn’t’ feasible, use stock images efficiently. Avoid predictable stock images—those you can easily see on others’ websites. 

File codes, image ALT texts, and descriptive titles should be relevant and should enhance your content. This improves SEO by reinforcing keywords, thus serving as an additional opportunity to rank on SERPs. 

Karl Armstrong, is CEO and Founder of EpicWin App. He previously ran an agency before founding his media company, which provides well-curated software and application reviews for different businesses. 

One SEO tip is to take and use your own images on your website, because search engines see unique images as more reputable, as though they are a primary source, and not a duplicate of another site’s photos or a widely used iStock photo.

Having your own unique photos on your site, with their original Exif data and tagged with an alt tag and description targeting your SEO keywords, is an SEO bonus that will help your site rank in regular search and image search. 

Stacy Caprio, Online Marketing Expert and Founder of Accelerated Growth Marketing 

Meta descriptions are windows that allow people to glimpse what your page is all about when they appear on a search engine’s results. Google automatically adds a meta description to pages that don’t have them, but they may not show the important points of the page. 

When writing your meta description, keep your blog’s important points in mind. You will need to condense them into a limited character count so make sure you include keywords that are relevant. This would make it easier to appear in searches. 

Israel Gaudette is Founder of Link Tracker Pro, one of Canada’s fastest-growing SaaS companies.

Build backlinks from high Domain Authority websites. It is one crucial ranking factor by Google. 

Sanket Abhay Desai is a Digital Marketing Associate for JPMorgan Chase. He also runs the blog, itsonlinemarketing.com

My #1 best advice for bloggers with basic and intermediate SEO skills is to leverage Medium to get quality backlinks and generate consistent traffic to their blogs.

Medium articles rank high on Google and 
move up the rankings very quickly. Create your own article and link to your blog post from the Medium article.  

Trishan Mehta has over 10 years of experience in managing multiple websites and driving traffic using SEO strategies that deliver results. He is the author of “WordPress SEO 101” and the Co-Founder of PassionWP

The best tactic to grow your brand exposure and drive traffic to your site is by using Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to get backlinks from authority websites to your website. 

HARO will connect you directly to reporters and their news outlets. You have a better chance of growing your brand with HARO than just tweeting at experts.

With an extensive network of more than 55,000 reporters and bloggers connecting with over 800,000 sources, HARO can help your site generate high authority backlinks that can help you rank your website when it comes to SEO. If you haven’t used HARO yet, now is the time! 

Randy VanderVaate is the President and owner of Funeral Funds, a life insurance broker who specializes in helping people pay for their funerals and final expenses.

Many SEOs only focus on content and on-page SEO and neglect link building. They also fail to adapt to the ever-changing rules and increased requirements on skills, tools, details, and perseverance.

Make sure that the backlink comes from a website that is relevant to your niche. Otherwise, it will not have too much of an impact and may even be harmful. You should start with niche-related communities: forums, blogs, or social groups, such as the Link Building Experts Group on Facebook, for example.

Testimonial link building is also important. Many businesses offer the chance to talk about your experience using their products. This gives a great opportunity to get a backlink and potential traffic from that site. And it usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request e-mails. 

Jennifer Willy is Editor at Etia.com,  where they provide the travel community with the latest information on Etias and other travel-related education. 

The best advice that I have for SEO beginners is to start building connections before building links. Over the years, the biggest impact for my SEO efforts have been the connections that I’ve made with writers, editors, blog managers, webmasters, company owners and many others.

A lot of times, you can get a backlink just by reaching out to someone you know from before. If you’ve done a favor for someone or just happened to work with them, make sure to always be on good terms because every connection you make as an SEO professional will come in handy at some point. 

Olga Mykhoparkina is a Chief Marketing Officer at Better Proposals, an easy-to-use proposal software that helps send professional proposals in minutes instead of hours. 

Focus on the ‘human side’ of SEO first. Answer the search query in a  comprehensive and natural way. You need to know what you’re talking about. So do your research and reach out to others in the know if you have any knowledge gaps on the blog post you’re writing.

Getting lost in the nuances of ‘technical SEO’ too often distracts from the bread-and-butter of ranking in Google – answering the search query better than anyone else. 

This does not mean you have to be an expert with decades of experience (although that would help). It just means you should have participated in your industry enough to have built up a credible knowledge base that you can now share with the world. 

Marc Christensen, Founder, Brilliant Ethiopia, a travel company specialising in East Africa. Before Brilliant, we founded Swoop Travel and Blue Ventures, companies which have been featured in Forbes, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times. Organic search is the pillar of customer acquisition for all of these companies. 

Spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it. If you spend a day writing an article for your blog. You need to spend at least one day promoting it on email and your social channels like LinkedIn, FB, FB groups, Reddit, Medium, etc..

Find influencers in your industry and comment on their posts. Eventually when you post an article, they may share it with their audience as well, earning you additional backlinks and social status on your blog post. All earning you more link juice in the eyes of Google. 

Stefan Cordova is an American tech entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of FriendWithA, a fully insured peer to peer rental marketplace to borrow almost anything. Prior to FriendWithA, Stefan worked as a software developer and worked in Software Asset Management for KPMG. 

Here’s my top SEO tip for bloggers: Set up a content delivery network (CDN) for your website. CDNs are great for SEO because they help speed up your website. One study found that 40% of mobile users will abandon a website that doesn’t load in three seconds.

If your website is slow, it won’t rank well! It’s quite easy to set up a CDN. Some hosting providers have an option to set up a CDN through cPanel. My favorite CDN is CloudFlare, which offers free CDNs to website owners.

David Lynch is the Content Lead for Payette Forward, Inc., a digital publishing company with a focus on cell phones and plans.

After testing extensively the last few months at Anvil, we’ve found the greatest impact in terms of optimization of blog posts is twofold: adding schema markup and reformatting the old content to answer common questions on the topic.

We’ve been able to take zero-traffic older blog posts and generate thousands of weekly impressions by lightly tweaking the content and adding schema to make the post more attractive to Google, as a possible position zero/voice search answer to common questions on the given topic. We’ve increased traffic on old blog posts (and FAQs by 1,000%) the past few months utilizing these techniques. 

Kent Lewis is a career digital marketing professional and has owned his own measurable marketing agency since 2000. He is the President and Founder of Anvil Media Inc.

Quality is king. No amount of backlinks will give you a top-ranking position unless the content you write provides exceptional value to your audience. Before building out a backlink strategy, make sure the content you write is original, creative, and well-researched.

Be sure to only cite sources with high domain authority. A clearly written, well-researched blog post is more likely to rank than a rushed and poorly written one with more backlinks. 

Liam Hunt is a writer and digital marketing specialist at IronMonk.com, writing about SEO, keyword research, niche blogging, and digital advertising. He received a master’s degree in political science from Dalhousie University in 2017.