To succeed is to work hard. That’s the phrase we’ve always heard from our parents when they share their stories and get sentimental. Normally, that’s what they want us to do to become successful in our career. However, does it apply to all things that we do, particularly in digital marketing? Certainly not! Search Engine Optimization isn’t about working hard, but working smart. So if you do work hard without having a smart approach and implementation in place, all your efforts will be put into waste and you will spend your time for nothing. A bit harsh isn’t it? But you can prevent that from happening and avoid the potential mistakes you may experience in the future. Read on to know how.

On-Page Best Practices

In SEO industry, incorporating best practices in your approach really matters. You need to make sure that the methods you will use to optimize a website are following the best practices at all times. Normally in SEO, the best practices should be applied to on-page and off-page, not just on-page or off-page. Google aims to deliver the best quality results as often as possible to their search users and if ever you try to play the game, manipulating your target keyword rankings in organic search, you won’t succeed in SEO – The key here is to always do things right.

Since you can’t gain full success if you don’t fix everything from within, make sure that your pages are properly optimized. But what sort of areas you should look at when applying on-page best practices on your website? While there is no such word as perfectly optimized site, having a checklist might be good as start up.

  1. Your title tag character is within the allowed display pixel in Google SERPs to ensure that your target audience won’t miss a thing of the title tag on your pages. You can consider try this tool by Dr. Pete on MOZ.
  2. Have no duplicate meta page description on your pages: Let Google decide to display page description of your site in search snippets – Source.
  3. Use one H1 tag on every page of your website.
  4. Optimize your images for search engine purposes and for users who have slow Internet connection benefits.
  5. One important thing to keep in mind if you aim to succeed in SEO is to make sure that your URLs are readable, short and easy to remember for users and search engine.
  6. Your site should offer sitemap so search engines might be able to find all pages available on your website you want to be indexed and displayed in SERPs.
  7. Your site should contain a robots.txt file so you would be able to restrict search engines from crawling some pages of your site you don’t want to be indexed.
  8. To ensure the amount of ranking authority flowing into your website strategically, remember to implement internal linking, which also helps to make your website provide better engagement with its target audience.
  9. Your website should be well tested to be able to run perfectly and be compatible on web browser that your audience is using to visit your website.
  10. And lastly, your website should be compatible with different mobile devices.

Off – Page best practices

Obviously, one of the key factors to succeed in SEO is to have online presence. You need to be confident that other people can see your website not only through search engines but also on other channels that your target audience are gathering. Since this is an important matter when it comes to succeeding in SEO, there are some crucial factors you need to look at before getting your website into something.

A. Keep relevancy

To avoid wasting your time promoting your website online, focusing on relevancy whenever you promote your website is definitely essential, either you are doing guest blogging, forum posting or even blog commenting, the topics that you’re involving your website with should be related to it. Ideally, not only the topic but also the website itself where you plan to promote your website. It should be in the same industry that you’re promoting your website.

In SEO industry, relevance matters a lot. I mean, SERIOUSLY. There are several reasons why relevance should be your focus when doing off-page activities for your website such as:

  1. First is traffic – If you associate your website outside your industry or target geographic location, the traffic you might be getting can potentially be irrelevant as well.
  2. Second is user experience – If you brought large amount of traffic to your website from irrelevant sources, (geographic or industry) they might leave your website straightaway, causing your bounce rate to increase.
  3. Links – If you build links on other websites, those links you will build could potentially hurt your website rankings since they might be perceived by the search engines as manipulative links to increase your keyword rankings.

B. Stay in high quality

Another thing to keep in mind when promoting your website through other websites is the quality. You don’t want your website to be associated or to be making activities on low-quality websites such as web directory sites, irrelevant linking, penalized sites and more. There is nothing you can gain from linking to those types of websites if you want to succeed in SEO. Since Google is always getting better at rewarding websites doing quality and smart work in terms of promotion online, why don’t you do the same?

SEO is not an overnight process when if you attempt to generate a thousand links, you will outrank your competitors. It just does not go that way especially if those links are from low-quality websites. Those links could be just equivalent to a one link from a quality domain in your industry or a trusted domain to search engines like .gov or .edu. If you could build those links, why work hard to get a thousand?

Since high quality plays an important role in SEO, below are some tips you could use for your own benefit when checking site quality.

  1. Check the site’s domain authority. Ahrefs Domain Rank is a good metric to use. Ahrefs Domain Rank, measuring how important the domain is by verifying the number and quality of its backlinks, provides rank range from 0-100. DR of 100 is the highest rank. A rank of 0-30 means the domain is unpopular, 31-70 means that it is average and 71-100 indicates that it is very popular.
  2. Check the site’s update frequency, do they update their website with content daily, weekly or monthly?
  3. Check website performance in organic search results. Is it ranking high? Does it get traffic from organic search?

C. Be natural

Natural approach is way better than manipulative approach. Search Engines favor and reward websites who don’t manipulate their link profiles and naturally build links and promote them in their target industries. This means, you don’t always have to link back to your website whenever you are engaging with other websites related to yours. You need to use other references as well especially if you are doing blog commenting, forum posting or even guest blogging. It simply does not feel like natural if you can only see one source of references being mentioned in your engagement, doesn’t it?

If you are struggling to build natural links to your website, you might find some tips below useful for your own benefits:

  1. Create resource pages – Resource pages are one of a kind in terms of link earning. They just don’t earn links for a specific period of time but they earn links over time. Imagine when someone shares something regarding a particular topic; he will definitely mention a resource page or an evergreen content that is more likely related to the topic.
  2. Provide tools – Tools don’t just earn natural links but they also constantly attract new traffic to a website. Who else wouldn’t want that? Just like Ahrefs, their tool continuously earns links from news sites, blogs, comments and even forums where people share the tool naturally which makes the link become popular and at the same time get promoted.
  3. Practise evergreen content publications – Resource page is awesome and link magnet to related sites, but resource page only might not be enough. Do take into consideration the evergreen content in your content strategy in link earning. The name says it all, evergreen content will naturally attract search organic traffic from time to time, earn links overtime and more importantly, can potentially rank its target keywords for a long period of time.

D. Be everywhere

Be everywhere is not only for SEO purposes but also for branding, popularity, customer relationship building, etc. purposes. You need to be where you can potentially find your target audience, be it in forums, social media, voting sites, blogs, or even news sites if possible.

To succeed in SEO, taking advantage of potential ranking signals that search engines might be using when positioning web pages in SERPs can help a lot not only in rankings but also in traffic sources. But you can’t just always rely on search engine traffic as you need to diversify your traffic sources to make them natural, which is probably what the search engines want.

To help your website become more popular and diversified with its traffic sources, which eventually helps to increase its brand presence in its industry, using some few tips below might be helpful.

  1. Participate in forum sites that discuss topics related to your industry and spend some times building your reputation in the community.
  2. Participate in comment discussions related to your industry to meet new people such as industry experts and newbies.
  3. Take part in industry voting sites, share some posts of bloggers in your industry and share you feedbacks.
  4. Be active in engaging with social communities in your industry, as social sites users nowadays tend to be online 24/7, 365 days a year.
  5. Join industry meetups whenever possible to meet new people and learn something new from their experiences.
  6. Use HARO to ensure you can get some attention from Journalists interested in writing about your industry.

E. Avoid obsolete methods

Every now and then, Google updates their algorithm to detect websites that still practise hard-core link building approach to manipulate their link profile through massive link building via article directories, low-quality directory submission and even keyword focused anchor text linking, forum spamming and link drop blog commenting.

Unfortunately, if you are really serious to win and succeed in SEO, taking those easy-to-obtain links out of your strategy is definitely crucial. Those are obsolete methods and could potentially harm a website’s search performance seriously on its target key phrases. Nobody wants that to happen, nobody would want to risk their website if the consequence is to lose organic traffic from Google in particular.

If you are left behind with industry trends or changes that happened over the past few months, years or even days, below resources could be handy:

  1. Don’t practise keyword stuffing – Source
  2. Avoid over using exact match keyword hyper linking – Source
  3. Don’t build links through article – Source
  4. Avoid creating shallow and thin content – Source
  5. Avoid no value duplicate content – Source
  6. Avoid low quality directories – Source Q&A how to find quality directory sites.

There’s a lot more of it to know but having those some important news in the industry in mind is a good start. You can explore the remaining unmentioned and share in the comments below. :)

F. Follow the guidelines

Ah finally! We’ve come to the most important part of doing SEO for any website. Definitely, to succeed in SEO industry and help your website perform better in organic search, follow the guidelines given by search engines is definitely the best advice that you could hear. While this information is fortunately free for everyone to read online, some may still be not fully aware of what really should be the dos and don’ts.

As you may not be aware, Google is using three guidelines that webmasters should follow if they are interested to have a chance to compete in organic search and benefit from search engine traffic. Remember that Google are using over 200 ranking factors and these guidelines should be the baseline of your success.

Design and content guidelines

Technical guidelines

Quality guidelines

Now that you have an idea about how to succeed in SEO, after quite some times doing SEO for your website or client’s website, you might be wondering about ways to measure your SEO success? You might want to check out some resources here.

How to measure SEO success in Google Analytics (Ranking Elite)

The real metric for measuring SEO success… (Koozai)

How to measure SEO success  (Search Engine Watch)

We’ve covered probably the most fundamental areas to focus on if someone wants to be successful in SEO. Always remember to keep in mind that SEO is not just an overnight process. A lot of smart approach and implementations need to be tested to actually see the results of your hard work. Don’t ever play the game as it feels like you will rank when you build a thousand of links. I know it’s tempting, it’s easy, but shoddy link building might put you into big trouble if search engines notice.