15 Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Today I’m giving you a fantastic list of important comments on SEO that you should pay attention to. Here is advice from other SEO experts around the web.

1. Neil Patel is the co-founder of Hello Bar and Crazy Egg and the author of the QuickSprout blog. He has been recognized as one of the best entrepreneurs in the world by the United Nations and President Obama, and the Wall Street Journal names him a top web influencer.
   

   Neil Patel – Important Comments on SEO you Should Pay Attention To

Track your SEO changes carefully, because when something goes poorly you need to know the cause so you can fix it. This means that you need to diligently keep detailed logs of every website/SEO change that you make.

Patel also advises that your site speed, including speed for mobile users, is critical to SEO today:

“Recent research found that 47% of your target audience expects your website to load in under two seconds. What’s more, slightly more than half of all U.S. online shoppers won’t buy from a site if it loads slowly.. . .Google cares about page load time.. . .[and] recent studies show that a delay of a single second in page response time can yield a 7% reduction in conversions.”

Finally, stay away from spammy guest posting and be sure to take special care with your guest blogging strategy:

Never place links in a guest post links that are irrelevant to the focus of that site. Do not use optimized anchors ever, and realize that it’s even worse to use these in guest posts. Monitor your Google authorship and authority to bolster your guest blogging validity. And never write irrelevant or poor quality content as a guest poster.

2. Jayson DeMers is the author of “Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise” and the founder of AudienceBloom. His number one tip for better SEO?
   

   Jayson DeMers – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Content is king. “Diverse, original, well-researched and value-adding content. Written articles, whitepapers, infographics, videos, and interviews are just the beginning. Your content needs to be highly targeted, well-researched, and unlike anything else on the market. Speak to details and help your readers accomplish their goals. Listen to feedback and undergo a constant process of revision to make sure your topics are helpful and valuable to your audience.”

3. Brian Dean is the founder of the SEO blog Backlinko, one of Technorati’s top 50 small business blogs. He advises:
   

   Brian Dean – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Find broken links on Wikipedia that are relevant to your work and take that opportunity to build new links for your business. This is a powerful SEO tool because, “Broken link building has it all…Scalable.

White hat. Powerful.” Dean describes how to find broken Wikipedia links here on his blog.

4. Sean Work, VP of Inbound at Crazy Egg, advises that you go one step beyond rank with your keyword strategy and decide which keyword(s) you want to be known for:
   

   Sean Work – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

“[Take] a deep dive into what your business is really about. Usually, people have an idea of the ‘hot’ keyword that they want to rank for. They think that if they can rank 1^st in Google for this term, it will bring them tons of traffic. But a lot of times, that keyword doesn’t match up with what their business really is about at its core. My suggestion is to go back to your unique selling proposition (USP). Are there keywords in your USP that you can try targeting? Does it make sense to use those words?”

5. Larry Alton, a business, social media trends and entrepreneurship consultant, advises us to do local SEO the right way by focusing on domain authority.
   

   Larry Alton – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

“While there are a lot of different nuances to local SEO, one thing doesn’t change: the importance and significance of domain authority. The strength of your blog – in the eyes of the search engines – directly impacts local and organic rankings. Some of the factors that go into determining domain authority include the age of the website and the number/quality of links pointing to the website. Domain authority is constantly being updated to reflect changes and developments, so it’s important to keep an eye on this aspect of SEO.”

6. Felix Tarcomnicu is an online marketer and entrepreneur; he blogs at ProOptimization.com. His comment is to watch the right SEO metrics to get better results.
   

   Felix Tarcomnicu – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

In Google Analytics, check these five reports. The SEO queries report, which tells you both your click through rates (CTR) and which search queries provided the most impressions for each URL; the SEO landing pages report which shows the average position of your pages and which landing pages perform best; and the SEO geographical summary report which offers an overview of CTR, clicks and a general sense of impressions based on your country; the traffic sources report will shows how visitors get to your site and who they are. Also watch the visitor growth report to monitor for drops in traffic and the blog post views report which gives you a sense of your content trends and level of engagement.

7. Ramsay Taplin, also known as the Blog Tyrant, tells us to build relevant, natural backlinks:
   

   Ramsay Taplin – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Never buy backlinks because Google will ban even a million dollar website for this kind of black hat strategy. Use backlinks from high authority sites, especially those with .edu and .gov addresses. Finally, choose anchor text based on a natural mix of your targeted keywords.

8. Brad Shorr, writer and director of content strategy Straight North, advises us to give high-priority keywords their own dedicated pages.
   

   Brad Shorr – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

“High-priority keywords—i.e., the ones in your sales wheelhouse—should have dedicated pages placed high in your website’s hierarchy and linked to most frequently from other pages on your site. Doing so tells Google that such dedicated pages are important and your areas of strength; Google will deem them important to people using those keywords to search, and will rank your content accordingly.”

9. Jill Kocher is an SEO expert and writer, and serves as the Associate Director of Search Marketing at Resource/Ammirati. She advises that title tags are critical to great SEO:
   

   Jill Kocher – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

“Title tags are still the single most important piece of metadata on the page. Their format is simple, and as with meta tags, your CMS will generate the tag for you from the title or headline you enter.. . .The best title tags begin with the most relevant keywords, product name, or article name, and end with the name of the site as shown above. Stay within 60 to 65 characters and keep the most unique, relevant, and valuable keywords toward the beginning of the title for maximum SEO benefit.”

10. Advanced Web Ranking’s Lia Boangiu recommends using multiple tools to generate better keywords because “getting unique keyword ideas can prove tricky if you only use one or two tools.”
    

    Lia Boangiu – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

She likes these keyword tools: Google Trends, Google Correlate, Übersuggest, Keywordtool.io, Soovle, and the SEOBook Keyword Tool.

11. Alexandra Gavril, a writer and SEO specialist at 123-reg in the UK, points out that optimizing URL structures is critical to SEO success:
    

    Alexandra Gavril – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Consolidate your domain versions and implement 301 redirects that take visitors to your preferred domain. Avoid dynamic URLs (the ones that use lots of numbers and symbols) and instead use relevant keywords. Use canonical tags that show spiders which content is original. And finally, create an XML sitemap to ensure that search engines don’t miss anything on your site.

12. Richie Contartesi, consultant to entrepreneurs and owner of www.AnabolicTechnology.com and four other start-ups, stresses the importance of meta tags:
    

    Richie Contartesi – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Meta tags should describe the page’s content and meaning concisely. These are the “previews” to your pages so they should entice your target readers to your page in 100 to 150 words without double quotes.

13. Chris Vande Lune is the Internet Marketing Coordinator at Half a Bubble Out. He states that as you formulate an SEO strategy you must think about both what your customers will love and what Google will love (and these are often the same things):
    

    Chris Vande Lune – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

Your customers want great content that is easy to access and contains only high quality links. They also want to find you on social media. Google wants you to use competitive keywords and tell its spiders what your pages are about using meta tags and meta titles. And both your customers and Google hate keyword stuffing, so don’t do it.

14. Bill Slawski, a Google patent expert, describes the growing importance of social signals to SEO rank:
    

    Bill Slawski- Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

“Google is definitely using social signals from Google+ in private results. . .There’s no clear sign that Google is using social signals in logged-out search or non-private results. But, my belief is that Google will likely use something like the User Rank and Credential Scores that appear to have been first developed for Google’s World Wide Q&A type sites, code named Confucius, as described in the patent application: Ranking User Generated Web Content.. . .So the quality of your actual interactions with other people at a source such as Google+ could potentially play a large role in ranking signals that Google might use to influence those results.”

15. Jason Acidre, or Kaiser the Sage, provides advice about getting links that drive traffic to your site:
    

    Jason Acidre – Important Comments on SEO You Should Pay Attention To

“The most actionable advice that I can really give when it comes to getting these types of links is to work your way up (not an easy route, but for long term campaigns, it’s definitely the way to go). The best way to get into these kinds of websites is to really prove that you have something that their readers would really want. Which I think is a better way when setting up link building campaigns, as you’d first need to start with the content assets that should be up and running on the client’s website – before you can actually get to pitch the top blogs in that industry. It’s a win/win in the long run, knowing that these assets will eventually be able to attract links from other sites that you weren’t even targeting in the first place.”

The bottom line

There’s no question that SEO is a vast and complicated area; I’ve curated these expert SEO tips to help you navigate it more easily and make sure your target audience is finding you online. Have a question? Ask below or tweet to me here @johnelincoln or @ignitev