😏Still Struggling With Web Marketing SEO? Quit Doing That!

Written by T. Alan Younker, posted 20 August, 2021

Web marketing SEO (search engine optimization) can be a confusing subject, like a young guy trying to figure out what women want. But once you have a checklist it’s relatively easy to take care of the most important aspects.

That’s what I have for you today, a series of suggestions that, once you incorporate them into your site, will encourage the search engines to gather the relevant data. Then they can direct searchers to the appropriate page and/or post on your website.

I’m sure no one ever complained “I get too much traffic to my sales page, please slow it down!” So keep reading and you’re sure to see some things that will help in your quest to increase the quantity and quality of your visitors.

If you’re in a hurry, here’s a summary of the web marketing SEO tactics:

Create a Clever Web Marketing Title – evokes curiosity, grabs attention
Include an Emoji – put one in front of the title
Design the URL of Your Page or Post – so it includes your keywords
Create a Snippet – it summarizes the content
Add New Content Frequently to Improve Your SEO – ideally several times a week
Use the “H” (Heading) Tags Correctly – H1 for the main post title, H2 for sub-titles, etc.
Put an Image Near the Top of the Page – a great graphic for your post
Add More Images – next to the text, to illustrate the content
Include a Table of Contents – what’s in the post, with anchor links to take them there quickly
Include Some External Links – taking the reader away from your site – there’s a reason
Add Several Internal Links – take the reader to your previous posts that are directly relevant
Add a Call to Action – post an offer!
Insert Social Media Share Buttons – tell the reader where to learn more

Now it’s time to get into the details of how these advantages might appeal to you.

STILL STRUGGLING WITH WEB MARKETING SEO? QUIT DOING THAT!: CONTENTS

Web Marketing SEO Tactics:

1. Create a Clever Web Marketing Title

To do that, you need to understand how to evoke curiosity, how to write a headline that gets people’s attention. If you reveal in the headline what the thing is, visitors won’t bother to click. As an example, which of these two headlines would you be more likely to click on?

How I Get Traffic From LinkedIn
The 7 Best-Kept Secrets to Getting Traffic from LinkedIn

I hope you chose the second one! A great title is far more likely to get you the opt-ins you’re trying to attract.

Look at headlines in national magazines like National Enquirer or Men’s Health, to see how they structure them. It can be very useful to analyze headlines from sites that have nothing to do with what you are marketing.

Another hint for titles, always capitalize the first letter of each word!

It often helps to make a numbered list, such as the “7-Best-Kept Secrets” title mentioned above. In that vein, for some reason people respond better to titles with odd numbers. It just an interesting quirk that reveals a subtle thing about people’s responses, but it’s a factoid that can be beneficial to marketers.

2. Include an Emoji

One simple add-on is to put an emoji at the start of the title of each blog post or page title. It makes your title stand out, gets people’s attention. There’s an free place where you can find a huge array of emojis: http://www.amp-what.com/unicode/search/icon

Because it’s not a graphic image, but rather a snippet of code, you can even insert it before the title of a WordPress post.

3. Design the URL of Your Page or Post

When you write a new article, be careful how you choose your URL. By default, if you have a WordPress blog the software will use something like a sequential number, or a form of today’s date, to make the URL. You want it to be reasonably short, but the length is less important than the inclusion of one or more of the keywords in the article.

For example, for my article “The Work From Home Affiliate’s Cheat Sheet” the default link would have been something generic, such as https://affiliatemarketingtips.net/?p=123. But I adjusted the “slug” so that the URL is https://affiliatemarketingtips.net/work-from-home-affiliates-cheat-sheet/

Including keywords in the URL is very helpful to the search engines!

4. Create a Snippet

You may have noticed a snippet near the top of a page when you did a Google search. But you may not have known what it was, why you would want to get your snippet shown there, or how you can maximize your odds of seeing that happen.

If your snippet is posted there, it increases your traffic compared to other entries in the search results. Everyone dreams of being on the first page of a Google search, but some people get a portion of their post above the first of the many search results.

A snippet usually appears as a list of bullet points, or it could be a numbered list. When you write an article, place it after the introductory section of your post, but before the main body of text. The snippet should ideally be 140–160 words long.

I recently did a Google search for “how to get free traffic from Facebook” and here is the snippet that appeared at the top of the page:

Do you think the crew at meltwater.com got extra traffic from being chosen by Google to have their snippet featured for that search, appearing above all of the regular search results?

5. Add New Content Frequently to Improve Your SEO

Your web marketing SEO job is to keep the search engines happy, and they really want to see fresh content. If you’re a blogger, add new posts several times each week.

It’s certainly helpful to put the key phrases in each paragraph in a bold font, so people can quickly scan through and see if they really want to take the time to read it all.

Another tip is to break your text up into smaller chunks. A big, long paragraph can look too daunting to visitors who have short attention spans (which includes most of us these days, it seems). Two or three sentences is enough before you start a new paragraph.

6. Use the “H” (Heading) Tags Correctly

Html code allows for a series of H tags, to show the hierarchy of headings. Visually, when they are used correctly they help to organize and define your article. They also allow the search engines to figure out what your content is about.

H1 is the largest, the giant one at the top of the page. It’s not just the biggest one on the screen, it is given the most importance by the search engines. So make certain that the main title includes your keywords!

It follows that the H2 tag is for subtitles, and the H3 tag is for sub-subtitles.

Correct use of these tags improves your rankings in the search engines. That’s the goal!

7. Put an Image Near the Top of the Page

The image shouldn’t be some plain vanilla item. Turn your title into a graphic that really attracts attention, maybe just the title presented in a visually appealing way, with a harmonious color scheme. But it can also include attractive graphics that relate to your content. Perhaps a person who represents the content, or some inanimate object that contributes to the words.

Also, include your keywords in the alt-text for this image.

8. Add More Images

Images help to add visual interest, but they can also be used to illustrate what the nearby content is about. In some of them (but not all) include a keyword or two in the alt-text for the image. This helps the search engines.

You want to make sure that any images you add are not copyright protected. I often use https://pixabay.com/ for images; they are free to use, even for commercial purposes. And you are not obligated to ask for permission or give credit to the artist. But with each download you can access the attribution data so you can give credit, and can financially contribute to the artist.

9. Include a Table of Contents

This feature is very important. It gives the search engines a summary of your content, your keywords, and the links to the different sections of your article. It’s an important part of our web marketing SEO efforts.

It’s also beneficial for your readers, because of the clickable links to take them to the respective sections. A glance at the TOC shows your reader what the article is about. And if your reader is only interested in one section, he or she can jump there easily.

For some marketers, the table of contents is the first thing they write. It gives them a framework for getting the rest of the content organized and fleshed out.

To make the entries in the table of contents into clickable links, which take the reader to the beginning of the referenced section on the same web page, you just need to add what are referred as “A NAME links”, or “anchor links.”

To show how this is done, I’ll use the example of the way the title of this section “9. Include a Table of Contents” appears in the table of contents, and then how we add the link in the TOC, and a similar link at the destination paragraph, so that the browser can find the appropriate section further down the page when the visitor clicks.

Here’s what my Table of Contents looks like before I have added the anchor link to the newest entry, in which there is not yet a link:

Here’s the html code for that line in the table of contents before the anchor link is added:

WordPress makes the addition of the link in the table of contents easy, you just need to highlight the text in the table, click the “insert/edit link” button in the Classic Editor menu, then type in a word that represents the link, preceded by the “#” symbol. In this case the word I chose is “#table.”

Here’s what it looks like as it’s being entered:

Here’s how that action changed the html code:

If you compare this with the previous one, you can see that all it did was add the <a href=”#table”> to the code. So, if you aren’t using a code editor such as WordPress, you can easily insert that into the code manually.

In order to direct that “#table” code to the start of the appropriate paragraph, we need to add a similar snippet of code there. In the WordPress Classic Editor, which is what I prefer to the newer “Gutenberg” block editor, I need to switch from the default “visual” tab to the “text tab” and adjust the html code.

Here’s the html code for the line in this detailed section, to which we want the Table of Contents entry to direct the browser, before it is modified to show the anchor link is added:

Notice that, in this case, it’s a Heading 3 section. All we need to do is expand the beginning <h3> tag to show the “table” callout we added to the table of contents, but without the “#” sign in front of the word, by adding this to the h3 code: id=”table”. The end result looks like this:

Now when the reader clicks on “Include a Table of Contents” in the Table of Contents, the browser will jump down the page to the heading of this section.

10. Include Some External Links

What? I should include links that take visitors away from my site? I know, it sounds counterintuitive, if not outright crazy, to do that. But the search engines look for that, and reward you for it. It’s one of those web marketing SEO aspects that we are not likely to think of on our own.

In a longer post you might include as many as four external links. Just make sure that the links are to quality sites!

11. Add Several Internal Links

Look for opportunities to add links between the post you’re currently writing and any previous posts that are directly related. You might also think about previous posts and maybe add internal links from them to your newest content. Two to three such links in each post are appropriate, and are appreciated by the search engines.

12. Add a Call to Action

If your website is offering any sort of product, or a freebie to grab people’s interest, you’ll definitely want include a “Call to Action” at the bottom of the page. See the example just below here, offering a free eBook. Of course, a timed pop-up offer is also a great idea. Have it appear maybe five seconds after the visitor arrives, then have a static version of the same offer at the bottom of the page.

If you have active social media accounts, don’t forget to provide links to them before you wrap up a new post or page!