12 Actionable SEO Tactics to Start Using Today

“Good SEO starts with the ability to implement it. You can have the best content and technical optimization, but if it takes you one year to roll out changes, the battle is lost.”

— Kevin Indig, SEO Ninja at Atlassian

As Kevin noted, much of a company’s SEO success lies in beating the competitors to the punch.

Here are 12 actionable SEO tips you can implement today so that you can results as quickly as possible.

1. Gain Links from Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a high-authority website that has a seemingly endless amount of information on almost every imaginable subject. This also means that it has seemingly endless amounts of broken links.

You can improve your search rankings by finding dead links relevant to your brand and edit the link to direct back to your site.

Use the WikiGrabber tool to identify broken links. From there, simply create or log in to your Wikipedia account and update those links with your desired destination; just make sure that it is relevant to the content.

2. Republish Old Content

Breathing life into old content is a great way to gain a boost in rankings — anything with a 2014 timestamp is essentially ancient today.

All you need to do to resurrect dead content is update it. Include any recent developments that may render the content’s information worthless or outdated.

Additionally, be sure to include “Last Updated on XX/XX/XXXX” next to the original publication date.

3. Link Internally

Internal linking is a common practice in which a site links to other blog posts or articles on the website. Leveraging this practice will help to lower bounce rates and keep time on your site high, which can effectively boost pages in the SERPs.

4. Implement an SSL Certificate

Security is a big deal at Google, which is why the company made HTTPS a ranking signal in 2014.

Backlino studied more than a million Google search results and found, “… a reasonably strong correlation with first page Google rankings,” and the implementation of HTTPS.

Don’t slouch on security; both your users and Google will reward you.

5. Improve Title and Description Tags

Compelling titles and descriptions are what drive clicks on search engine result pages.

Leverage Google’s Keyword Planner to identify long-tailed keywords and optimize your title and description with these phrases.

Help to give your pages a boost by implementing the piece’s dominant keyword(s) in the description and title tags; also, be sure to keep the title tag at less than 60 characters.

6. Discover Keywords on Reddit

Reddit is an absolute bonanza for uncovering the keywords that your audience is actually searching for. Since the website houses forums (or subreddits) for just about every topic ever conceived, many in-depth conversations about your industry have likely taken place.

This can be, at times, a better resource than Google’s Keyword Planner. The folks who populate these subreddits are often entrenched within an industry and are discussing products/ideas/etc. that are well below the surface and can help you target your audience more effectively.

Just look at the phrases that users continually use and cross reference that information with Google to see if it is a worthwhile pursuit.

7. Create “What Is” Articles

Anyone who is outside of or new to an industry often does not know a lot of the niche’s jargon. If you search marketing lingo such as “SEO” or “influencer marketing,” one of the top search results is always “What is XXX?”

This idea is not isolated to just marketing, either. To help your site land on Google’s first page, start creating “What is” articles for your industry jargon and be sure that the title follows this formula.

8. Transcribe Company Videos

Videos are a stellar way to drive engagement across social platforms and on websites. Video content is skyrocketing in popularity, yet leaves a lot to be desired SEO-wise because engines still don’t understand video content.

This issue is easily remedied, however, with the implementation of a transcript. This maximizes the use of keywords used in the video.

Take this a step further by transforming the transcript into a full blog post and add relevant and high-ranking links, applicable images and any additional information not mentioned in the video.

9. Leverage Competitor Links

Competitive link analysis is such a popular tactic that it has spawned its own industry.

By leveraging tools like Ahrefs (which has also compiled a stellar list of actionable SEO tips for beginners) or Majestic, you can identify who is linking to your competitors. From there, start identifying similar industry opportunities for links. Considering that your competitors are in the same niche, you can even reach out to those same publications; they might be interested in your content as well.

10. Buy an Existing Website

Done right, this technique can have major SEO and ROI benefits.

Blogs are ideal to target because they often have low income and tons of content.

Acquiring an existing website has several SEO benefits:

• Absorbing the site’s traffic into your own;
• Acquiring all of the site’s existing content;
• It’s keyword rankings are now yours.

11. Create Actionable Content

Actionable content will trump opinion pieces nine times out of 10; a variety of studies confirm this.

Why? Because people like sharing information that is helpful to them and others in their communities. It’s that simple.

12. Make Content Easy to Share

Again, people love to share content. If your social sharing icons are nowhere to be found, it will likely remain largely unseen.

Implement social sharing buttons that follow the reader down the page and the piece is more likely to get shared a number of times, increasing traffic to your site and the content’s potential for going viral.

All of these tips are something that you can take action on or implement today. Stop waiting around for the competition to one-up your SEO strategy and get to work actualizing these tactics.

What are your favorite quick SEO-boosting strategies?

Conscious online marketer, web executive, and multi-faceted writer Tina Courtney has been creating and fostering online innovations since 1996. Tina has assisted many clients in maximizing online production and marketing efforts, and is a staff writer for SiteProNews, one of the Web’s foremost webmaster and tech news blogs. She’s produced and marketed innovative content for major players like Disney and JDate, as well as boutique startups galore, with fortes including social media, SEO, influencer marketing, community management, lead generation, and project management. Tina is also a certified Reiki practitioner, herbalist, and accomplished life coach.  Learn more on LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.

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