Advanced SEO Tactics

Really get to grips with the detail


You have done the SEO basics but still

want to increase your site traffic?

So you have great content in your site, full of the right keywords and phrases, the meta descriptions are set for every page and post. You have carried out the SEO audit we mention in our SEO Basics post and tackled anything it threw up. What else can you do now to make it even better?

As ever, this is WordPress specific, but a lot of this is good practice whatever platform you use.

Find out what your visitors want

Seems obvious, but it is surprising how many people broadcast a message that they think people want to hear without doing any real research. Matching your content to what your audience wants means they will spend more time on your site, come back to it, bookmark and recommend it to friends.

Obviously you can’t easily talk directly to everyone who might come by your site and quiz them on their deepest desires. So the next best thing is to use is a website such as Quora. This is a site that allows people to ask questions and receive answers, often from experts. You can use this to your advantage by using it to check your keywords, go there and type your focus keyword in and you will get all of the questions people are asking about that topic.

Those questions are really useful, they give you an insight into what people are thinking and can be used as inspiration for content you should be producing. If you create a landing page with one of the most popular questions as it’s title then it will get found and ranked.

Landing Pages

Consider creating specific pages for some of your important topics, or ones that maybe don’t fit into your main site structure. In fact you are reading one right now, it’s title is a long-tail keyword (that just means three or more words rather than one keyword) that is aimed at a specific question that this page provides the answer to. With engaging content and the pages title, meta description and keywords set the result is a page that should rank really well.

Landing pages are commonly used for promotions and advertising campaigns. Banner ads and social media posts can all link back to a specific page, then you can see just how much traffic has been generated by the campaign. Use that landing page to engage and hold onto the new visitors.

Good SEO makes hipsters happy. Not that we care.

Recycle and update your content

Search engines love up to date content, constantly creating new stuff can be taxing, so why not repurpose some existing content? Look at your site and see where you can present in different ways, or maybe pull some apart and make a few posts out of one existing story.

An example here would be taking each of the steps and making individual pages of them, then we would have six or seven pages instead of one.

Updating old content is also really beneficial, look back at older posts and see if you can update them with fresh info or news. Add ‘updated’ in the title and change the publish date and hey presto, more content.

Pay attention to category archives

Wordpress automatically creates archive pages for each category, add some unique content to this to improve the general SEO. To do this go to Posts > Categories and choose one of the entries. Then you have the options to edit the name, slug and description of your category.

LSI (Love, Sex, Intelligence?)

Unfortunately this doesn’t refer to the 90s classic track by The Shamen, in this instance it stands for Latent Semantic Indexing which is a dull sounding thing Google uses when working out how to rank sites. Anyway, here are The Shamen to cheer it all up…

All that the dull version of LSI means is the context a keyword appears in, it’s how google works out the difference between an apple that you eat and one that has a keyboard on it. It works out that in one context it is surrounded by words like iPad, iPhone and iMac – whilst the other one talks about cox’s orange pippins and how it sets the benchmark for flavour to which all others aspire.

Synonyms are really important here, find other words that clarify or expand upon your meaning, so instead of repeating ‘SEO optimisation’ I could say SEO techniques, tips, tricks, best practice etc. Don’t forget that the aim is to make it more readable and informative.

Further reading