Search Engine Optimization Tips
Basic search engine optimization (SEO) is both fundamental and essential to your business and website in general. SEO will aid you in positioning your website properly so it can be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site.
So, what is it that search engines are looking for? Is it possible to build a website in a way that will please both your visitors and customers, while still pleasing Google, Bing, and other search engines? More importantly, can SEO help your web presence become more profitable?
Carolyn Shelby (@CShel), Director of SEO, Chicago Tribune/435 Digital, fully explained the extreme value SEO can deliver to a site, and stressed the importance of basic SEO using the following analogy:
“Skipping the basics and spending all your time and money on social and ‘fancy stuff’ is the same as skipping brushing your teeth and showering, but buying white strips and wearing expensive cologne,” Shelby said.
So, what is SEO, Exactly?
Well, it’s simple, the purpose of SEO is to:
– Create a great, seamless user experience.
– Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.
Alright, now imagine your website is a cake.
Your links, paid search, and social media act as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and essentially makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.
What Do Search Engines Look For?
All search engines really want to do is their job and they try to do it as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what the user is looking for. So how is relevancy determined?
Content: Is determined by the theme that is being given, the text on the page, and the titles and descriptions that are given.
Performance: How fast is your site and does it work properly?
Authority: Does your site have good enough content to link to or do other authoritative sites use your website as a reference or cite the information that’s available?
User Experience: How does the site look? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?
What Aren’t Search Engines Looking For?
Search engine spiders only have a certain amount of data storage, so if you’re performing shady tactics or trying to trick them, chances are you’re going to hurt yourself in the long run. Items the search engines don’t want are:
Keyword Stuffing: Please don’t overuse keywords on your pages, trust us when we say it’s not helping at all.
Purchased Links: Buying links will get you nowhere when it comes to SEO, so be warned.
Poor User Experience: Make it easy for the user to get around. Too many ads and making it too difficult for people to find content they’re looking for will only increase your bounce rate. If you know your bounce rate it will help determine other information about your site. For example, if it’s 80 percent or higher and you have content on your website, chances are something is wrong.
Keyword strategy is not only important to implement on-site, but should extend to other off-site platforms, which is why you should also be thinking about multi-channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms include:
– Offline, such as radio and TV ads
Being consistent with keyword phrases within these platforms will not only help your branding efforts, but also train users to use specific phrases you’re optimizing for.
Optimizing for Different Types of Results
In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience, make sure to focus on mobile and tablet optimization as well as other media.
Create rich media content like video, as it’s easier to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to get a plain text page to rank.
Optimize your non-text content so search engines can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDFs, make sure you read up on the latest best practices so search engines can crawl that content and give your site credit for it.
Summary
You should always be keeping SEO in the very forefront of your mind, and always follow best practices. Skipping the basics of SEO will not only leave your site’s foundation a mess but also prevent you from fully maximizing revenue opportunities.