Do you know what the largest traffic source for your site is? It’s not social media or direct visitors…It’s actually Google. And if it isn’t, that means you haven’t thought about your SEO the right way.

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 19 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point…

Keywords

Research – have you performed keyword research to see which phrases are popular and related to the post you are writing?

Headline – have you included keywords within your headline? Your headline should be attractive and contain phrases that people may use when searching on Google.

Headings – are you using headings within the body of your blog post? And within those headings, have you included any keywords? Google places more emphasis on keywords that are larger in font size.

Context – are the other words within your blog post related to your main keywords? Google is like a dictionary — it looks at keywords as well as synonyms to get a better understanding of what your blog post is about. Just make sure you are not trying to manipulate Google. Naturally use phrases related to your main keywords when you are writing for humans.

First 100 words – do you use keywords within your first 100 words? Google places more emphasis on words and phrases that are placed towards the top of the page.

Internal links

Links are a simple way to control how you pass PageRank from one blog post to another. A simple internal link can drastically affect your rankings.

Cross linking – have you linked to other related blog posts that you have written in the past? By doing this, you’ll help boost the rankings of your older posts.

Old blog posts – have you gone into your older blog posts and added links to your newly written posts? You should be doing this on a monthly basis as your older posts tend to carry more authority than the newer ones. Make sure you don’t abuse this tactic — only use it when it makes sense.

Anchor text – are your internal links too rich in anchor text? Don’t stuff your internal links with too many keywords as it will reduce your rankings. Make sure the anchor text contains text that is part of a natural flow instead of just keywords.

 External links

Linking to external sites can affect your rankings in a positive way

Related blogs – are you linking to other relevant resources within your post? This helps Google identify which blogs are relevant to yours, and it helps determine what keywords you should be ranking for..

 Content

Content is king. And the text you write within your posts affects what you rank and don’t rank for.

1. Duplicate content – did you take any content from another source? If you did, make sure you link to it. Also try to avoid having a high percentage of duplicate content in your blog post as this may cause a Panda penalty.

2. Thin content – is your blog post thin and mediocre? Writing blog posts purely for SEO reasons is a great way to get hit by a Panda penalty. Focus on the quality of your content instead of quantity.

3. Length – is your blog post long enough? There is a direct correlation between the length of your post and its ranking. The majority of the web pages that rank on the first page of Google contain at least 2,000 words.

Images

A picture says a thousand words, and for that reason, you’ll probably have a few within your post.

File name – is the file name of your image rich in keywords? The more descriptive your image file names are, the better they’ll rank in Google image search.

Alt tags – did you include a descriptive alt tag for each image? By adding alt tags to each of your images, you’ll help them rank higher within image search.

Dimensions – is the width and height of your image large in size? The bigger the dimensions, the better your rankings will be.

File size – are your images as small as possible in file size? Compressed images that are still high in quality tend to rank better.

Uniqueness – are your images original and unique? If you have the time to take your own images (or pay someone to take them) and use them within your posts, you’ll notice that those images have better rankings in image search than stock photography images.

Load time

Speed affects rankings. The quicker your blog loads, the higher your rankings.

Media – have you optimized the media you are using within your post? Using media such as images, videos, or audio files is a great idea, but they need to be optimized for load time.

Javascripts – are you adding any extra javascripts to your blog post? Try to minimize the number of external scripts you are using as they tend to slow down load time.

Source: http://www.nikosiliopoulos.com