5 SEO Tips From a Webmaster With 5 Years of Experience

I have been a webmaster for about 5 years. I have done SEO, performance analysis, AdSense tracking, ad management and keyword work for many sites, and I have bought and sold several sites. This post covers what I would tell anyone who wants more visitors. The basic rule in this field is patience. The results of your changes show up over time.

1. Choose keywords carefully

A keyword says what you want to represent. If you pick "teddy bear" for an article, you are telling Google the article has information about teddy bears. If you pick "car rental" for your site, you are telling Google the site is related to car rental. So the keyword matters a lot. If you can't explain to Google what you do, you won't get good results.

How do I tell Google who I am?

The answer is simple. Google keeps monthly search numbers for every word and shares them publicly, so you can analyze them with Google Keyword Planner and reach a conclusion.

One thing to watch while you do this. Keywords with a high search volume attract more competitors, so ranking on the first pages gets much harder. If you are confident, go for them. If not, pick keywords with lower volume to improve your chances of ranking. The screenshot below shows the average monthly searches for each keyword.

As you can see, "araç kirala" (rent a car) gets between 100K and 1M average monthly searches, and competition is high. The minimum cost per click paid for the AdWords ads at the top of the page is 3.93 TL. So instead of competing for "araç kirala", it may make more sense to compete for a niche keyword like "bmw kirala" (rent a BMW).

2. Analyze your competitors

One of the most important things you can do for your site is analyze other sites. You can see where you are going wrong, what the others do well, and apply it to your own site.

For my own sites, I search for my keywords on Google and look at every site on the first page to see what tactics they use. With Semrush I can see which sites link to them and what results they get from those links. I also analyze their keywords and add the ones that make sense to my own sites. This makes the gaps in my own site easy to see. You can do the same with tools like Semrush, Similarweb and Ahrefs.

3. Get organic comments

Organic comments matter a lot for your site. When visitors comment on your site or posts, it moves you up a step on Google. They have to be organic. Spam comments and bot comments lower your ranking. Google is smarter than you think and has been at this a long time, so it has already planned for whatever you are thinking of trying. Get comments from real visitors, because tricking it won't work.

I tested this on my own articles with comment rules like "the first 10 people to comment get it for free" and "comments of only 2-3 words will not be approved". That got me organic comments with long text, and it put me in first place for many of my keywords. Good content still matters, because the time users spend on the site is also a ranking signal.

4. Backlinks

Getting the right backlinks matters because that is how Google measures how trustworthy a site is. Links from sites with high DA and PA values, like Wikipedia, Facebook or Pinterest, raise your own DA and PA, make your site more trustworthy and give it more authority. That brings more visitors. Links from spam sites hurt you. Check at regular intervals which sites link to you in Google Search Console and disavow the bad backlinks.

5. On-site and off-site SEO

On-site SEO covers your titles, content, heading tags (h tags), site speed and images. Done properly, it raises the quality of your pages and improves your chances of getting visitors. Off-site SEO means backlinks. The backlinks you receive play a big part in how well your site does. The links you give matter too, because going overboard is never good. You can find more detail at Ayhan Karaman.

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