My White Hat SEO Strategy for 2015

With over 45 days left for welcoming the new year, I've already started planning my White Hat SEO Strategy for 2015 to stay ahead of my competition. Running a blog which doesn't have traffic and a loyal base of readers defeats it's very purpose of existence. In the coming year, I plan to push my blog further up the search results page for certain niche keywords and focus on higher conversions rather than large amounts of traffic which don't convert. Of course large amounts of free traffic via White Hat SEO is always good for your blog; there's no denying that.

So, here are the main areas I'm going to focus on for the year 2015

1. Target Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords often have less competition in the SEO race. Many bloggers and webmasters are becoming aware of it, but it's not too late for you to start targeting them instead of common short keywords which have high competition. As usual, I'll be using Google AdWords' Keyword Research tool and Long Tail Pro to find out long tail keywords with low to medium competition and a good amount of average monthly searches. 750-1500 monthy searches should do.

2. Write content for Users and not for search engines

This point seems to contradict the title of this post itself. But what I mean is that, don't write blog posts keeping only SEO in mind. It's people who read your content and take action; be it downloading your new free ebook or replying to your post in the comments section. This is what differentiates successful bloggers from the not so successful ones.

3. Monitor performance thoroughly 

Without monitoring your blog's performance and the keywords for which your blog ranks well or not using various analytics tools is like walking blindly in the Sahara desert. You should gather data such as, what age group the visitors of your belong to, Demographics, Gender etc. When you know such details, you can write more more blog posts targeting such people. For example, if your visitors are mostly males in the age group of 15-29, you can write more on gaming computers if you own a tech blog or about sports gear if you own a blog in the adventure/hobbies niche. 

4. Outsource link building

Link building takes a lot of time and can truly test your perseverance and patience. I always outsource link building via guest posting and let them care of my link building needs while I concentrate on more important issues like writing more quality content and collaborating with fellow bloggers. It's also important that you do link building carefully unless you want to get penalized for getting backlinks from blacklisted sites.

5. Optimize for local search

Google delivers search results very differently when compared with the results that were returned 2-3 years ago. Google now focuses on delivering results which are relevant to the location, gender and other information provided by the user. Search results vary for different people searching for the same keywords.
Keeping this in mind, I'm going to blog more about products and services which are more popular in my country or state.

6. Quality is King

 The last thing I'm going to focus on is to try to make my blog future proof so that my rankings aren't negatively affected badly by future updates. The last Penguin update seemed to have affected a lot of websites making their rankings plummet. I've not seen any changes in the traffic and site rankings by the update for this blog. My other blogs have seen quite a bit of variance both positively and negatively.

The way I'm planning to make my blog future proof is by following this principle-

"Quality is King"

The blogging mantra for most bloggers is to keep publishing posts regularly just for the sake of SEO. While this approach may give you good results in the beginning, rest assured that it wont hold good for long. Google now ranks websites which provide quality content. The way Google bots keep track of such quality sites is by measuring the amount of time visitors spend on the site. This data is also available to you in Google Analytics.

So, there you have it. My entire White Hat SEO strategy for 2015.

Feel free to ask questions and share your methods in the comments section below.