With all the talk about our new “Rock the Social” training courses there are some subjects we are not covering. The reason we are not going to cover some courses as they take too much time for a 4, 8, or even 40-hour course. One of those courses is search engine optimization (SEO). We will continue to cover search engine optimization in these articles to continue that education process for those that wish to do everything on their own.
Search engine optimization is a group of techniques to the highest results possible on the search engines. Each item we’re going to list below are powerful. Together they can help you achieve greatness. These are a few of the high-level 30,000 foot items that you need to think about when it comes to search engine optimization.
Behind the scenes of every website is meta information. The meta information contains information about your website. The internet has progressed so has meta information. Today this old information is still around and there is a new kid on the block. This new kid is structured meta data. With structured meta data there is a lot more information that can be given to the search engines to make your site more relevent.
The first part of SEO is having high-quality content that answers the questions your visitors have. As you write content it needs to be written in a way that is engaging and makes your visitors to want know more.
Part of content writing is a constant change of content that will benefit your users. A great way of having a constant influx of content is by having a blog where articles are written for your visitors to add value to their lives.
The user interface to your website plays a lot to how a user interacts with all the elements of your website. When the elements work harmoniously together your users will stay on your website longer and interact with it.
We see a constant move toward mobile. Our lowest site has a 10% mobile while others are in 70-80% range. Mobile and tablet devices are more important each day.
A key part in Google’s strategy is to secure the entire Internet. The old call was to have SSL which has been proven to be not as secure. That is okay though as there is a new encryption method in town called TLS. Even sites that do not take credit cards still have contact forms and other forms of input and having this information encrypted protects your users.
Security is also not just about that all important “lock” on your website. You need to keep the information on your site updated and secured. Having automatic updates on could make your site more insecure than not updating at all. The reason for this is some updates could incorporate new known vulnerabilities.
The load time of your website is critical to how many users visit and want to stay on your site. Sites that take too long to load will make your visitor want to leave and not stay on your site if you would like them to.
As stated previously page speed or load time is crucial. Having images that are too large will slow the user experience and lower your results within the search results. Images that are optimized by file sizes the text that identifies the images needs to be clear and concise. When it comes to the alternate text think of it as a quick “elevator sales pitch” about the image.
We see this all too often. Sites will have links that no longer work or have scripts/modules on them that produce errors on their site.
Analytics will play a core part in your SEO strategy. This will range from seeing where people go, what pages they leave, what sites they are coming from, as well as what they type in the search engines. If you have good analytics you can see where they are clicking on your page, how they are filling out the forms on your website, and a lot more.
Using your analytics, you can see what is and is not working and adjust monthly so that the information that you are presenting is hitting the widest possible audience.
There are a lot of key areas to look at when it comes to your search engine strategy. Each item we’ve listed is only a small subset of what needs to be done on a weekly basis. Not all you need to do will happen each week. The key is that you should allocated 8-12 hours per month to your search engine strategy once you have a solid handle on it. When you first start out double or triple that number as you will need ramp-up time as well as continual training time to stay aware of the latest changes that Google, Bing, and other search engines are bringing out each month.
If you would like help in this endeavor give our search engine maintenance plan a check as it covers everything from above and then more. You can reach us at @BUSINESSPHONETOLLFREE@, email at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@, or use our online contact form here.