Want to succeed at SEO? Good practices start with avoiding bad habits of the past. Eliminate ineffective practices and replace them with strategic, content-focused tactics. Here’s few of our tips to help you grow.

1. Useful, high quality, relevant content “Dwell time” is the amount of time visitors spend on your website and it can affect SEO ranking.

Providing useful content, visitors tend to stay longer on your website to consume the information and therefore increase the dwell time.

Although word count doesn’t rule the SEO world – nobody will read your stuff if it’s not helpful to them – longer content does give you the opportunity to provide more value, include more keywords, incorporate more outbound links, and of course, get people to spend more time reading to increase dwell time.

Another reason to create highly useful content is that when visitors bookmark your content on Chrome, it will improve SEO ranking of your website in Google.

2. Approach keywords strategically.

Keyword phrases should be as specific to your company as possible and have an easy, conversational sound not a marketing vibe. Just consider how you search for things online.

Instead, take a long-tail approach to keywords. Consistently publish as much amazing content as you can, which naturally will include keywords, and you’ll capture long-tail search traffic. This type of traffic tends to come from keywords you would probably never find during the research phase and that are often more targeted, resulting in better conversion rates.

3. Strictly adhere to an originality rule.

When it comes to SEO, originality refers to duplicate content or the same text existing at two different URLs -something that you should always avoid. Republishing articles from other sites is not only a potential copyright infringement, but it also creates duplicate content, which can ruin your site’s search rankings.

4. Optimize your site’s load speed.

Site’s loading speed is a factor in search-engine rankings and it also affects the rates of converting visitors to customers. Amazon calculated that a one-second increase in page-load speed would cost a company $1.6 billion in lost sales per year.

Start by checking your site’s load time by using a tool like Pingdom, which will give you a breakdown of each element and how long it took to load. Use the resulting information to optimize images or pieces of code that are causing long load times.

5. Be Natural.

Simple steps can achieve major SEO boosts. In the end, SEO is all about improving the usability and user experience of your website. Any change that makes your visitors happier is likely to make search engines happier. So SEO is really about making people happy and that should make us all happy