Content is King - Well known and well established! What makes great content? Content which your readers and search engines appreciate.

If search engines appreciate your content, it is easily findable and can become easily popular. Now if your readers have to appreciate it, your content must offer quality. Period.

In this post I am assuming that you are offering quality content. If not you can stop reading this post; it will be of no use to you!

But if you are sure that your content is usable and is of good quality, then please continue reading.

In this post, I will give you 4 SEO tips which you can implement on your blog and outside your blog (not offline, still online but but not on your blog) to help you please the bots.

Optimize headings

It goes without saying that heading (aka title) is the first thing that gets into the eyes and head of your readers before the body of your post.

Heading is also the one which reaches the masses; the number is usually substantially larger compared to the number of people who really read your post.

And it is normally good (or even great) if there is no big difference between these two numbers. That is, if almost all the people who read your heading also choose to read your post, this means that your heading has served its purpose.

That is, if all those people who read your headings are convinced enough to click through your link and check what you have got, then you win.

But how to attract your target audience? Read more in your niche and write hot off the press headlines in your niche. Make sure you use less competitive keywords in your niche in your post headline.

Now, this is not an easy task. You cannot simply find less competitive targeted keywords in your niche unless you spend hours in researching. But don’t worry.

You can do it with the help of Long Tail Pro (aff link). I use Long Tail Pro to do keyword research for my blog posts. Honestly, this software saves me TONS of time since it is quite fast.

Internal Linking

Two things- You need to do it, but shouldn’t over do it. Let me explain.

In order to make it easy for the search engine bots to crawl your webpages, you should do inter-linking of your blog posts. For those who have not heard about interlinking, here it is:

Two plugins which help you with this process and indeed make interlinking super easy are: Insights and SEO Smart Links.

I used to use Insights, however now that this plugin has not been updated for a while, SEO Smart Links is a good option.

SEO Smart Links can make it a bit too much with linking if you are not careful with setting things up carefully - but there are ample settings available to help you take control.

But why you shouldn’t interlink too much?

(i) You may raise an alarm to Search Engines, which may think that you are trying to manipulate something.

(ii) If you provide a lot of links on one post page, that is flow of link juice. Even if the links point to another post on your own blog, it is still link leaking. So do not end up adding one link to every sentence of your blog post.

Guest Posting

Ya, it won’t be fair if I don’t mention guest posting in this list. You must be familiar of the standard benefits of guest posting, right from getting do-follow backlinks from high PR blogs to becoming a better writer.

How does guest posting help you with SEO for targeted traffic?

One of the top perks in doing guest posting is getting authoritative backlinks, among other things. Now, I say authoritative assuming that you choose well established blogs that offer quality content in your niche.

If your blog has such authoritative backlinks from many blogs, depending upon the number, search engines give you priority when they display results in SERPs.

So when you aim at less competitive keywords AND happen to posses a good number of authoritative backlinks, you will sure be ranked top in SERPs for that keyword (and many related keywords). The combination will give an extra push to boost your search engine rankings.

Social engagement

Okay, here goes the bitter truth for the ‘not-so-caring about others’ kind of people. You have to do this for SEO. I know we are all busy. We publish posts in our blogs, moderate the comments, deal with spammers and so on.

So where do we find the time to engage with other people?

Moreover, are social media sites the greatest distractions in the online world? Yes they are indeed! But you know who you are.

If you have a blog and not having a group of people know about it, your blog will not be found by search engines. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit; the search engines will find your content, eventually. But how about ranking higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Your links have a 95% chance of NOT being clicked (well, to be precise, not being looked by people) if you don’t happen to be on the first page.

How does social engagement help?

1. You make loyal friends who will be willing to promote your content.

2. Your content is everywhere.

3. You content gets backlinks from all popular social networks. Remember, links from Twitter and other social sites matter a lot, whether do follow or not.

But in order to achieve these results, “engagement” is the key. You cannot just create social media accounts and start posting your links everywhere.

It is about relationships and making people share your stuff out of trust, feeling being helped and welcomed and sometimes simply out of love.

So make it happen!

How to engage in social media sites for effective off blog SEO? That’s story for another post; coming soon!

So what do you think. I hope I have given you something to think of and implement. Let me know your thoughts in comments.