100 Proven SEO Techniques 2017
By: Bharathi Priya
Tags: SEO, Online Marketing, Marketing, Seo Techniques, Digital Marketing

Nowadays, SEO is blossoming like a magical world surrounded by thousands of SEO witches with tons and tons of SEO tools and strategies as wands. No one can say whether the magic works or not, but every SEO witch is working too hard to win the heart of search engines, the miracle maker. Let’s go for a quick flashback.

How did a traditional SEO work?

A traditional SEO is a man of perfection who followed any SEO tutorial step by step and executed it as it is, without any question. Closing his eyes and spinning hands all over his keyboard, he involved himself in a huge number of directory submissions, article spinning, blog commenting and so on.

So, what’s the need of the hour? How should a modern SEO work?

A modern SEO should be a strategist who build his own stories and learn by himself through experiments. He won’t rely blinded on books or tutorials, whereas he compiles his own book out of his learnings. He builds his content primarily for users with search engine tags included. He focuses mainly on the quality of the content produced and build backlinks naturally. He looks upon semantic strategies and does specifically focused meaningful promotions. Now let’s talks about top 100 PROVEN SEO tips. This is a compilation of some real-time experimented tips that resulted in desirable outcomes to improve productivity. To facilitate a successful transition from the traditional SEO model to modern SEO model, I have shared some proven SEO tips of my career which are rarely found all through the Internet. Let’s get into the tips straightaway. Key takeaways:

Learn hidden real-time experimented and proven SEO tips

Know the avenues to be focused for better visibility

Every tip comes with real-time explanations and steps to implement

Understand the path to build your own marketing strategy

Every tip comes with real-time explanations and steps to implement.

Explained in simple language that anyone can understand.

Table of contents

It’s not KEYWORD; it’s just a keyword!

Go for long tail, even it’s searched lesser

RIP keyword density metric

Can you predict your website’s future?

Spying isn’t illegal in SEO; Spy to the core

Be social with social media

Tag yourself and get your face detected

Videos not only serve users but also bots

Over-optimized page tastes over-cooked

Your website is one; with/without www

Think twice, before placing any link

Construct your links guessing user’s mind

It’s time for some SEO don’ts

Say goodbye to subdomains

Design agency? List of design directories

No spammier directory submissions

More votes; more credibility!

It’s not KEYWORD; it’s just a keyword!

I often see people struggling with keywords. No, Keyword is not at all a difficult word to find. It doesn’t need an excel sheet or an intelligent compilation. It’s all about understanding your user’s mind. It’s just how a third person describes your website. Before going for any so called keyword tool directly, you need to do two steps.

Talk to your target audience

Analyse the terms they use while describing your product/service

Write down all those words and then go for Google keyword tools to get the number of searches

Tools to be used : Website search button analytics, Google keyword planner

All the SEO experts normally prefer to go for highly searched keywords with less/medium competition, since they don’t want their website pushed down out of a heavy competition. In my opinion, I would like to rephrase the same and suggest you to prefer even less searched long tail keywords to capture the complete share of it. Gradually, it brings your website to the top for related generic keyword searches.

Identify all long tail keywords

Analyze your competitors to understand their keyword strategy

Experiment and then implement

Search for questions related to the topic and use them as long tail keywords

Tools to be used : Ubersuggest, Spyfu, Answer the Public

There are tons of searches through search engines to know the percentage of keyword density to be used for SEO copywriting while optimizing each and every piece of content. I can say, don’t even think about keyword density anymore, since you are not going to use the same keyword again and again, but only its synonyms and related entities. Search engines have the greater intelligence to map synonyms and entities to the keywords.

List down your keywords, its synonyms & related words

Spread each of them in your content naturally

Optimize them in your images and videos too

Tools to be used : LSI Graph, Meta glossary

Yes. You can. Wonder how? Just type through the search, search engines suggest you the mostly searched terms related to your keyword and the new ones that you’re not even aware of. Apart from that, you also have Google trends to guess a complete picture of how your market is going to be in the near future.

Know all the search engine operators to find all possible predictions and do check out “searches related to” section at the bottom of your search results.

Subscribe to Google trends

Read your industry related news periodically

Tools to be used : Google Trends, Feedly

In SEO, Spying is the main key to success. You can do SEO by yourself, but understand your competitors keyword strategy and build your digital marketing tactics on top of it, takes you to desirable levels. Know your competitor, follow them wherever they go, analyse and then build your strategy to surprise your competitor.

List out the keywords that your competitors are using

Identify their market and target audience

Build your keyword strategy accordingly

Tools to be used : Spyfu, SEMRush

No content reach can be done successfully without the contribution of social media. Wherever your leads or prospects go, the only one object, which goes along with them, is their mobile with all social media apps installed. It’s a must for every SEOs to keep track of the user’s interests by monitoring what’s currently trending in social media.

Check out the tags (#) in social media using tools like Topsy or Social Mention. The same tags can act as an effective keyword

Follow your competitor’s page and social media feed periodically.

Also, you can get tons of keyword ideas from sites like Wikipedia, reddit or delicious

Look at the trending tags in twitter or Facebook. You can create an individual promo page with those trending keywords to capture real-time visitors

Tools to be used : Social Mention, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter

On-page SEO is all about tagging. Title tag, Header tag, Meta keyword tag, Meta description tag and the list go on and on. Though there are people who say Meta keywords are no more, I suggest you to go with all the tags as much as possible, provided it should not be stuffed or spammy. Get your main keyword at the first in all these tags to get your website more visible for the main keyword.

Choose 2 main keywords and place them in your SEO tags like URL, H1 or H2, meta keyword and description

Have a call for action in your Meta description to improve click through rate. E.g.: Try for free, Download now

Place tags related to the respective page, don’t stuff all keywords in index page. Let them be distributed across your pages

All marketers place videos and images in their website to make the users understand their product/service much better. Apart from this purpose, this also serves as a medium of SEO optimization. By having the keyword as alt tag, image/video name, search engines understand what the video or image is about and index the same in search results for the specific keyword.

Use title tag in videos/images along with alt tags, to be displayed to the user on mouse over the image

Keep the alt text of your images short and simple, since it looks cluttered to the users on image loading time

Don’t dump the same keyword in all images/videos, it should be more specific

Add transcription for every video to gain more SEO visibility

Search engine optimization is like food, it wont tastes good if it’s over-cooked or under-cooked. It’s up to the search engine experts to act as a perfect chef and prepare delicious food. Many SEOs think that optimizing a website to a greater extent gets their website to the top of the SERPs. But these days, this simply don’t work as search engines are becoming more and more intuitive.

Make use of synonyms or LSI keywords to avoid keyword stuffing

Don’t write content, thinking about the keyword. Optimize the content for SEO after drafting your content completely

Distribute the main keyword few times and if you optimize further, optimize with your secondary keyword as well

Your website may have different versions, either it may be with www or without it. If you use both those versions, search engines see your website into two and you wont get as much as indexing benefits as you expect. And this is the same case with http and https versions.

Redirect your non-www version to www

Move to https as quickly as possible, since https websites are given more preference and ranking at the top position as per search engine algorithm

Prefer 301 redirection. Don’t remove any indexed page as much as possible whereas you can 301 redirect to related page

Linking the pages is more important than the website itself. You can build your website, but without proper linking, your users wont get to know your product/service as expected. In the same time, prioritizing the value of your website links is also equally important. Balancing the website links as per the value provided brings you benefits, in turn sales.

Restrict the number of links in every page; keep it as much minimal as possible. Let it doesn’t exceed more than 100 links

No-follow less prioritized links like privacy policy, disclaimer, contact us and similar pages

Make your external links open in a new tab (target=blank) to reduce exit rate

Constructing links in your website pages requires you to do detailed analysis on your user’s behavior. Before you add links, understand the source/region from where majority of your users are coming from, whether through search engines or referral sites. And then add links accordingly guessing what your users may want to navigate in the next step.

Link every page atleast to any other page. There shouldn’t be any page left behind, since it lags SEO benefits

Structure your links as per the page navigation and goal funnel in Google analytics to achieve maximum goal conversion rates

Track the links clicks in all the pages by adding cookies (?cookie) to the end of the URL that is detected in Google analytics

From Visually.

Search engines insist every website to follow certain guidelines to get more benefits out of organic search. However, people tend to override such guidelines through black-hat and grey-hat techniques. I can strongly say that black-hat and grey-hat no longer exist, but only pure white-hat exists in this world of dancing algorithm changes.

Reduce the usage of flash in your website, still it’s difficult for the search engines to crawl them

Avoid hidden text; you aren’t supposed to hide keywords in white text on a white background. The same that’s visible to the bots has to be visible to the users without any manipulation

Reduce the usage of iframes too

Page URL structure needs some homework and it has to be decided properly before making your pages live. People use to have abc.com, one.abc.com, two.abc.com, abc.com/one, abc.com/one/two and it goes on and on. There are too many folders, subdomains and lengthy filenames. But what’s best for your users as well as search engines?

Make sure to use abc.com/blog instead of blog.abc.com, since it is considered as a two different website

Add keywords in your subfolder name also. Say if the page is about directory list, you can have the url as abc.com/directory/high-pr.html

Write shorter and meaningful filenames in a way which your users can remember and relate to it

Be Roman when you’re in Rome. Promote your website focusing your target audience. It doesn’t make any sense or benefit, if you promote your SEO agency in a design directory. Relevant promotion with relevant anchor text in relevant domains brings you back SEO benefits, which reflects in gaining top search engine ranking position for that relevant anchor-texted keyword to your website.

Say if your website provides both SEO and design service, you need to promote it to SEO directories with SEO based anchor text and the same needs to be design based in case of design directories.

The same one shouldn’t be promoted to any unrelated directories just to increase the number of backlinks which is useless in obvious.

Choose the perfect category into which your website fits in, while promoting. If it’s listed specifically under it’s category, the backlink is taken as a quality backlink

The first step of off-page SEO that any SEO experts learn is directory submission. In previous days, SEOs used to have a huge list of directories sorted based on their page rank. They submitted their website in all the directories by copying and pasting same title, same description and same set of keywords. But nowadays, directories lost their trust among search engines, since most of them are spammy.

Don’t submit to all the directories (ignore the ones which share the same template, have illegal links and less page rank)

Don’t prefer reciprocal links or paid links from low quality directories. This may reduce your website’s quality

Submit to directories like DMOZ that has greater credibility and good page rank

Not only in elections where a leader is selected based on the number of votes, but also in search engine algorithm where your website gains credibility based on the number of votes and bookmarks. When more users bookmark your website in their browser or any bookmarking website and visit your website repeatedly, search engines value those returning visits to your website.

Add share buttons and bookmark buttons in your website, motivating your visitors to share, if they like

Create your company profile in popular social bookmarking websites like diigo & stumbleupon, follow similar interest profiles and stay proactive

Promote your product /service by sending private messages to few valid profiles in social bookmarking websites

As I mentioned earlier, any SEO activity, which we do, should look natural, but not like an intentional promotion. This is a common problem with most of the SEOs. Whenever you look at any forum discussion, you can identify at least one XYZ SEO’s reply in proper promotional words with keyword as anchor text. And if you copy paste the reply from XYZ SEO and search in Google, you can find too many results with the same content.

Use different anchor texts while promoting. Based on the nature of the website you promote, you can have related keywords as anchor text

If you use same anchor text for all the submissions and promotions, search engines identify you as over-promoted, in turn affects your SERP

Don’t build your anchor-texted backlinks on blog comments. Instead, try using read more or view now texts to look neutral

Guest post was a trend before. But now, it lost its credibility because of the spammers all around the web. They intentionally write a post to get backlinks, in turn spam the master website with a number of interlinks and author bio links. Search engines identified this trend and penalized such websites by implementing an algorithm as it always does.

Don’t allow less quality guest posts into your website. Get a complete moderation in place to prevent your website getting penalized due to less quality guest post links

The same applies to your guest posts as well. Adding your link in a less quality blog doesn’t bring any benefit to the backlink

Other than guest post, try writing blogs in web 2.0 websites like Hubpages and Medium

Your prospect can enter through any of your website pages, not necessarily it should be the index page. Every page needs to have all the necessary trusted elements and call for actions to achieve greater goal conversion rates. There are awesome landing page samples available all through the web to help you in deciding which works best or worst.

The first scroll of your landing page must contain a heading, a quick description, video/images, a lead form, necessary call for action and few trusted elements like awards and recognitions

In the second scroll, you need to explain about product/service, its features, pricing and few immediate links

And there should be social media icons included too. If you have a newsletter, you can even place your subscription form in your landing page

When you are surfing through the Internet to know something immediately and say if the website is taking more time to load, what will you do? You just close it adding a count to its exit rate and go to another similar vendor. This is the same case with your website visitors, if your website loading time is high. This is the most important factor to look at, before starting up your off-page SEO.

First look out for images and videos. All you have to do is to compress and optimize the file size of your images and sprite them to make all the images load at once, instead of allowing every image to load individually

Write your codes, style sheets and scripts and validate it through W3c validator to reduce loading problems on your website

Evaluate your site’s performance periodically using tools like Google page speed tool, YSlow and Pingdom full page test

The very important activity of SEO is distributing press releases bringing up more and more branding. You should not consider it as one another promotion like submitting to multiple news sites. Rather, if you outreach your press releases well planned and perfectly optimized, it creates brand recognition among search engines and in turn huge impact on your search engine ranking positions.

Write your press releases not in a promotional language, but in a meaningful way describing the benefits of your release. This helps to enhance the quality of your brand

Reach out to publication channels and spread your press release with a link back to your website

You can do an aggressive promotion campaign about your release gaining the attention of bloggers, social media influencers and industry experts and make them write about you naturally

Assume you have promoted your link aggressively to huge number of directories, bookmarks and wherever possible and say your user gets a “Not Found” page on clicking on it, it becomes a complete mess. It’s extremely required to check your website for broken links for continued navigation and promote your website, only after fixing all the links up and live.

Make use of broken link checker tools available in the market like screaming frog SEO spider tool and Xenu’s link sleuth. These tools crawls your website and fetches all broken links

Check the broken links in Google webmaster tools too

Make sure to disable cookies, JavaScript and CSS, while checking the broken links using tools

After you’re done with your on-page SEO optimization and link building, what’s next. You should monitor your website’s visibility in search engines periodically. Check whether all of your web pages are indexed, what pages are showing up first for your brand name search, Is your website getting indexed for all of your main keywords?

Find the number of pages indexed by checking site:yourdomainname.com in Google. If its count is lesser than the total number of pages, you have to identify the factor behind non-indexing

Check using CopyScape tool to identify duplicate content, if the index count is larger than the actual number of pages in your website

Search for your brand name in Google. If you find your page at first and all high profile pages listed below it, you’re safe. If not, check your webmaster tools, check for possible errors and add sitelinks

It’s up to the webmaster of a web page to decide which page needs to be shown to the search engines and which page has to be hidden. Accordingly, there are certain options like sitemap, no index Meta tag and robot.txt to facilitate you with such privileges. But these tags and files have to be created and updated with extreme care to prevent you from backfires.

Restrict search engine bots from crawling certain pages of your website by including them in robot.txt file or adding no-index Meta tag. Make sure the main pages of your website is not restricted by any chance.

Inform search engines about the important pages on your website in sitemap.xml and sitemap.html (web version) and prioritize them as well

Create image sitemap, video sitemap, other language pages sitemap and split your main sitemap into two for better clarity and visibility

This is an era of question and answers. Search engines prioritize question and answer websites, forums and discussions at the first, followed by the vendor pages. You can also get some valid prospects and leads by participating in such discussions and answering their queries. It also allows your users to compare your service with your competitors in a single thread.

Subscribe to Google alerts on a specific keyword and whenever someone ask question for product recommendation, be the first to reply and capture their mind

Follow people and send private messages to them, stating about your product/service

Subscribe to responses and reply to the comments, once you receive the notification email

Many webmasters didn’t even know whether their website is penalized or not and they search all through the forums and discussions asking for expert’s opinion. There are only two metrics which clearly tells you — traffic and index status. By periodically analyzing these two metrics, you can keep yourself prepared and prevent yourself from losses.

Check your Google Webmaster tools for penalty message, if any. Do check your index status too. If your website is de-indexed, its penalized for sure

Monitor your website traffic. If you see a deep drop, identify the pages where you experience the change. Then, see the cache version of your website. If the links and design are the same as in real, there wont be any problem

Disavow backlinks, if the penalty is because of manual action i.e. less quality backlinks to any of your webpages. Once you fix the reason for the penalty, you can send a reconsideration request to Google to clear things up.

People normally say content is king. But I would say content is like a queen. Behind any king’s bravery and success, there lies an intelligent and elegant queen. Behind any website’s visibility and recognition, there lies high quality meaningful content. Content itself is sweeter and on-page SEO and link building just adds more taste to it.

Make sure to write your content without any spelling or grammatical errors and easily readable by using proper fonts

Don’t hide most of your content inside flash, images, videos or your JavaScript. Let it accessible to both search engine bots and users

Write your content neutrally for multiple audiences — let it be technical person or a layman or an expert. You can include some keywords but should not dump it aggressively

That’s true. Search engines don’t encourage duplicate content in your website. And the same happens even when you copy the whole content or even a piece of it from another website. The copied website which posted the content first is treated as original one whereas the latter is treated as duplicate and gets penalized for the same.

Add rel=canonical tag to the secondary page, if you have created two pages with the same content. By doing so, the secondary page wont get indexed by Google giving preference to the primary page.

Check duplicate content with your secured version as well sub-domain pages as well. To identify which website has copied your content, you can use the tool copyscape and inform the concerned Webmaster

Understand that there won’t be indexation problems for pages like abc.com/abc?page1, abc.com/abc?page2, but you can use previous, next links to help search engines to understand your website’s navigation and follow the same

URL, the path to your website has to be remembered easily and streamlined accordingly. This also helps you to outreach branding and to increase direct traffic where people just type the URL directly and visit your website. At the same time, it should be structured based on the nature of the individual page.

Use static URLs without excessive parameters or session IDs. Prefer short descriptive URLs.

Go with vertically ordered links for category & sub-category and horizontally ordered links for relevant category and relevant product pages.

Use footer links to achieve proper page navigation

For category pages, use URL like abc.com/category/page.html. For a subcategory page, it can be further sub-foldered

SEO is all about experiments. You can’t certainly say which strategy works for you, unless otherwise it’s experimented or tested. Right from the design, call to action buttons, content, placement to even full stop, each and every section of your website has to be tested and webpage needs to be updated based on the results derived from those experiments.

Always create different versions of any landing page or ad. AB test those versions using a proper AB testing tool and finalize the one which is declared as a winner

Choose your desired metric to execute experiments. It can be goal conversion like download, sales or lead form filling or it can be even bounce rate or average time on site

Test the effectiveness of your lead nurturing mailers by splitting your leads and sending two different email versions to understand which mailer works perfect for you.

As I pointed before, the era of traditional SEO comes to an end. It’s emerging through the semantic web of schemas into conventional search. In previous days, search engines were looking at the websites as keywords and indexed it for the same. But now, there emerges a new metric named entity. Entities provide search engines, an enhanced visualization of your website to bring out more relevant

Markup all the details of your website like contact no, address, logo, address, phone no, customer reviews, images, videos and so on, to get benefited from knowledge graph

Go for Json-LD markup (approved by Google) instead of microdata which enables you to markup any detail using script without affecting the design and usability of your website

Add the markup codes in your website, add a no-index tag to it and test using structured markup tool. Once the code is approved without any errors, you can remove the no-index and make the page live to users and bots

People are moving from desktops, laptops to mobiles and iPads. These days, no one even hesitate to make secured online transactions through mobile. Things are getting better through improvised apps day by day and people are becoming expertised on taking the best out of the apps as well. So it’s a must for any product / service to develop mobile applications for the users.