Last week we proudly sponsored The Digital Showcase’s latest event, The SEO Social. Attended by SEO specialists and digital marketers eager to learn about the latest industry trends, the event explored how SEO fits in an increasingly automated world.
Throughout the evening, the exciting speak line-up shared the strategies, techniques and tactics they use to drive their sites to the top of search engines.
Here are five things we learnt at The SEO Social:
Automating certain processes can increase your productivity
By automating certain reports, naturally you’ll save time. Senior SEO Manager at 360i, Alex Douglas-Mann, talked about how important it is to reallocate the time you’ve saved to performing tasks that add value. Spend this extra time analysing other aspects of your site and working out where you can optimise to improve your ranking.
Don’t cut corners when it comes to optimisation
Lukasz Zelezny, Head of SEO at ZPG (USwitch) shared his unconventional tips for researching, optimising and sharing content. His tips taught us not to cut corners and to remember that SEO optimisation comes from a combination of many smaller factors.
Remember to modify your title tags, strong tags and ALT tags and customise your image file names. Structure your content by using H1, H2 and H3 tags; this will make it easier for search engines to crawl your content. If you’re using internal links, make sure you use keyword rich anchors. All these elements will help to optimise your pages for SEO.
Use all the tools at your disposal
There are many tools out there that can help you optimise your pages for SEO. Moz, Google Search Console, Pingdom and SEMRush are all examples of tools that can help you identify the keywords that you are ranking for, which position you appear in for particular search terms and which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. You can use these insights to feed into your SEO strategy to improve your organic ranking position.
Maintain a 0.5% – 2.5% keyword density
To help improve your organic search ranking, you can place your keywords strategically within your copy on your pages. Include your keyword in thetag, ideally near the front of the tag and aim to keep your title tag under 65 characters. You should also include your keyword in your H1 tag and synonyms to your keyword in your H2 and H3 tags (if you have them). Google now recognises synonyms to keywords too so be sure to take advantage of this!
Automation can make natural search more powerful, but at the moment, it won’t replace it
The Head of Digital at Kobestar Digital, Kobi Omenaka, concluded in his talk that while automation can help to make natural search more powerful, there is no ‘one size fits all’ tool. Tools like SEMRush and Search Metrics can make you significantly more efficient but you still need the human element to help you write great quality copy that is both beneficial for SEO and enriches the user experience.
We’ll be heading to more SEO meetups in the next few months, so keep your eyes peeled for more tips and advice. Follow us on Twitter to find out where our upcoming events are!
This post was first published on Global Dating Insights