One of the first priorities of white hat SEO is making sure your website is optimized. If you haven’t accomplished these basic tasks, all of the great content being created might be a waste.

Title Tags

These tags are extremely important as both search engine optimizers and also to catch users attention in the SERP. Putting your most important keywords near the beginning of the title will provide the best results. You don’t need to use your domain name in the title because you will already be ranking highly for this. Make sure these title tags are less than 65 characters.

Meta Tags

The description meta tag gives searchers an idea of what your content is about in the SERP. It is important to add some keywords here but also make sure it is relevant and something that will receive attention. The description should usually be between 160 and 200 characters.

Image Alt Tags

Internet users are increasingly desiring photo shareable content. Sites like Facebook and Pinterest are leading this charge. Adding photos and images to content is a great way to draw attention and increase the chances of content being shared socially. When adding images, make sure to include the alt tag with a relevant description of the image. This will help with ranking in search engines as well as providing traffic through photo searches.

Commenting

You have to be careful when implementing comments for SEO purposes. If you come across as spammy, your efforts will have a negative effect. You can leave comments on no follow and do follow blogs, forum posts in both cases only make comments that are helpful and relevant. Do Follow blogs will provide some SEO benefits that Google and other search engines will see. No follow comments will also help but in a different way. When you make relevant comments on a more popular no follow blog, you have a chance to be noticed by the author and then linked to in their content.

Social Media

Social media is quickly becoming a very important aspect of SEO. There are many reasons that social media can contribute to your website being seen by SERPs. The first benefit is that as your content is shared socially, you increase chances for others to see it and create links to it. These back links will help establish authority with Google.

Secondly, social media channels like Google+ have a direct effect on SERPs. When a users pushes the +1 button, all of their Google friends are then more likely to see that content on relevant searches. Google has even recently announced that other social media channels will effect search results. They have said that the Google algorithm takes into account how much a certain page is shared on Facebook or Twitter as an indication of quality.

Guest Blogging

Regardless of what product or service your business sells, guest blogging can help generate targeted traffic to your website. With millions of blogs on the web, it doesn’t take long to find one that focuses on a relevant topic in your industry. Take the time to make a connection with blog owners and ask if you can contribute content on their site. This will give you the opportunity to reach a new audience, find social followers, and generate quality back links that Google will find.

As always, whether it’s your own site or as a guest, be sure to make quality and genuine content. This will provide lasting impressions on readers and search engines online for the future.

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