SEO in 2016: Top 7 SEO Strategies That Will Take You to the #1 Spot

SEO is the epitome of change. What’s relevant and useful several years ago may be just a thing of the past now. Fortunately, not all of those SEO trends and techniques are cliché and useless these days. Most of them are still relevant, while others got a great boost and made it to the top SEO techniques you should use this year, which we’re going to talk about.

In a recently updated blog, SEO expert Brian Dean discussed the 21 actionable techniques you can use today. He talked about how business owners, marketers, webmasters, and SEO specialists can increase site traffic and rankings using a range of carefully selected strategies. While you’re free to check the post anytime you want, we thought it would better for you to have access to its simplified or curated version.

Note: Brian highly recommends responsible and strategic content curation. We’ll talk about it later on this post.

So, let’s get started. Here are the SEO techniques that will take your business (and rankings) to greater heights.

Finding Link Building Opportunities on Blog Directories

As link building is a complex process, allow us to discuss just one of the most effective approach you can use this year and beyond. Visit blog directories, such as AllTop, to find lists of updated blogs in your niche. This gives you a whole new world of linking opportunities for your page or your entire website. Connect, interact, and exchange links with the most influential bloggers in your industry. As SEO experts would often say, “don’t build links, build relationships”.

Using Benefit-Driven Curated Content

What makes proper content curation special is that you have easy access to all the quality resources on the Web. Update, improve, and redesign content to create new opportunities to gain more traffic, shares, and following. Brian Dean talked about this on his blog about The Skyscraper Technique, the technique he coined and used to increase organic search traffic to his site by 100% in just 14 days. You can do it for your business as well.

Linking the Hilltop Way

Hilltop may be an old Google algorithm, but it still affects today’s search engine landscape. This onpage SEO signal tells Google whether a page is a hub of information, depending on the quality and relevancy of its outbound links. Establish authority and improve your rankings by linking to pages that link out to awesome, informational resources.

Learning YouTube SEO

Instead of writing a short snippet about your YouTube video, try adding an informative, high quality 200-word description. You’ll be doing yourself and Google (the owner of YouTube) a big favor. Google relies on your video’s title and description to determine what it’s all about. Insert your target keyword for a great boost in search ranking.

Maximizing the Power of Long Tail Keywords

Adding a phrase that gets a decent amount of searches per month, along with accumulated quality links, to your target keywords is an effective way to gain traffic. In his “actionable SEO techniques” blog, Brian Dean explained how creating titles with long tail keywords could take a piece of content from nothing to the first page of Google search results.

Ranking for Your Own Keywords

Have you ever thought of creating your own keywords? No, we’re not talking about the products of your keyword research and all that stuff. What we’re trying to say is that you can think of a word that describes or represents your business, or a unique strategy you’re using (i.e. Dean’s The Skyscraper Technique). As it’s unique, everyone will be curious and read about it. People will share your content and probably link to your page. Those are tons of free ranking and link building opportunities.

Creating Better Content Using Your Target Users’ Data

While your main purpose of writing content is to provide useful information to your target audience, you can actually use users’ data to boost search traffic. Find out what your target customers are talking about online. What topics, products, services, or even problems and solutions are they interested in? Reddit, Quora, the comments sections, forums, and social media sites are among the best places to find good topics or inspirations  for your next content.

Did you find these ideas useful? Perhaps now you’re thinking of using some or all of the strategies we discussed on this post. RefractROI, your premier provider of effective SEO services in Denver, would be there to assist you in implementing these techniques. Contact us so we can get started right away.

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