There’s no way of getting genuine traffic to your website unless you’re sticking to the rules of SEO. Unfortunately, knowing which rules matter the most is not easy, which is why we’ve decided to help out. Here are the 10 commandments of SEO that you must stick to at all times!

1. Thou Shall Not Cheat Google

Stay away from Blackhat methods as they have the potential to ruin your whole work. If Google realizes that you’re trying to scam your way onto the first page, your site will get penalized. This is something that it probably won’t be able to come back from.

2. Thou Shall Not Cheat the Visitors

Some Blackhat proponents advise optimizing content according to keywords that get lots of searches on Google, even if they don’t have anything to do with the niche of the website. This way, you may be able to bring them to your site, but they’re guaranteed to leave as soon as they realize there’s nothing there that’s of their interest.

3. You Shall Not Steal (Other People’s Content)

Websites using duplicate content are bound to get penalized by Google. So, make sure to run all of your articles through CopyScape before posting them.

4. Provide Your Visitors with Content that Matters

The importance of quality content is growing each day. In fact, this is how Google envisions the future of the internet – the sites that provide good, informative content are going to be on the top of the search results page, while those that feature articles with no value for the readers are going to get lost somewhere behind.

5. Optimize Your Articles the Right Way

According to Yoast, the keyword density should be between 0.5 and 2.5 percent. What this means is that a 1000-word-long article needs to have the main keyword used at least five times. Of course, it’s not just about the quantity, but quality as well. The keywords need to be included in the text as naturally as possible so that it will remain highly readable.

6. Make Readable Articles

What’s the point of writing long and complicated articles if your visitors aren’t able to read them? If you’re using WordPress, Yoast SEO plugin can help you with this. If not, you can use the Hemingway App to check how readable your articles are.

7. Establish Quality Backlinks

In order to boost your ranking on Google, you need to improve the authority of your site. One way of doing it is by getting reputable websites to link to you. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. Still, if you work hard (and invest some money), you will probably be able to find a quality site that will link to your site.

8. Stay Away from Bad Backlinks

Some sites out there exist only in order to sell backlinks. The problem is that such sites are probably going to get penalized by Google as soon as their scheme is exposed.

9. Get Rid of Bad Links on Your Site

Having a link on your site that’s pointing to some other site means sending the SEO juice that way. And if the site in question is poor quality, it can have a disastrous effect on your Google ranking.

10. Remove Broken Pages

A good piece of advice to make sure there are no broken pages on your site is to do an audit every couple of months. Unsure of how to do it? Ask for help from marketing agencies columbus ohio or elsewhere that have expertise in all things SEO. The professionals can go through your previous content and spot if there’s something wrong with it.

Final Word

As you can see, SEO can be a pretty difficult thing to do, especially if you want to do it properly. But, if you think that it’s going to take too much of your time, why not ask professionals to help you out? There are lots of sites out there, like Yourcontentshop.com for example, which offer all kinds of SEO-related services.