For many content marketers, organic traffic earned through SEO is like a holiday bonus: It’s cool if it happens, but no one is planning their monthly budget around it. It’s a new era for SEO, an era where you can no longer keyword-stuff your way
to search ranking success. Nowadays, if Google finds out that you are blatantly
overusing (or hiding) keywords on your site, your credibility (and rankings) could
take a serious hit. However, this doesn’t mean that keywords are totally irrelevant.
In fact, if you’re doing what Google wants you to do (creating high-quality content),
keywords will work there way naturally into your website’s pages. Make sure that your web page URLs are SEO friendly, use mod re-write for Linux and Apahche hosting or use IIS redirect for Windows. Ideally make it so that the URLs describe your content. The key to a successful list post is no more complicated than including a large number of quality items.
Checking for Links for SEO
When launching a new website that replaces a previous version, use 301 Redirects to tell the search engines that your pages have moved. Doing so will retain your hard-earned Google Page Rank and your search engine positioning should stay more or less intact. If you do not use 301 Redirects when launching a new/replacement site, search engines will still have your old pages contained in their index, and both search engines and visitors seeking out your content will encounter broken pages when they try to visit your site. This will result in lots of 404 Page Not Found errors. When this happens, your search engine rankings will most likely drop. A page’s title
tag is the clickable text that appears in search results. Though easily overlooked, it’s one of the most important factors in on-page SEO and capturing your visitors’ attention — describing in just a few words what a page or document is about. Most people get SEO wrong, because they focus on what they think search engines want instead of focusing on the user. Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your
content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.
Ensure each page has a unique target keyword
Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly. Avoid elements that
annoy visitors. You might think that a cool pop-up will make people sign up for your great e-book, but that popup might just as easily make them surf away from your site altogether. Keep in mind, when a searcher goes to your site, then quickly clicks the back button and chooses another result; Google and Bing are not looking kindly at you. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring. The first step once you start an search engine optimization (SEO) project is to find out how many keywords you expect to use for all your pages. The number of keywords needed for an organic SEO project depends on the business and what words would be beneficial to provide the site with acceptable traffic.
Spiders and bots, oh my!
While developing your mobile site, you’ll have three options: responsive design, dynamic serving and a separate site on a subdomain. Google prefers responsive design. This way, you have one site that adapts to the device it’s used on. Make sure the site makes good use of anchor text in its internal links. This is a free opportunity to inform users and search engines what the various pages of your site are about. Don’t abuse it, though. For those who have the budget and want instant visibility paid search often referred to as pay per click or PPC for short is the ideal solution. Using platforms such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads advertisers can market their business to potential customers anywhere in the world. Like SEO, PPC is a very specialist field and to get the best results it’s advisable to employ a company that knows what they’re doing and has a proven track record of success. We asked an
SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "Duplicative or unnecessary website content can also hold you back from your true ranking potential."
It doesn’t always guarantee high click-through-rates
Picking the right keywords to optimize for is very important. Usually, it’s a good idea to pick mid-tail keywords, including the local area you are focusing on. Timely topics are
seasonal (like holiday recipes) or more focused on current events or news coverage. Timely topics have a much shorter lifespan, but can drive large bursts of traffic if done well. Higher volumes of backlinks are great, but combining that with high diversity is what’s really going to move the needle. The navigation should help the user browse the pages without problems. From the menu structure to the link structure and the page’s design, even a slight detail may impact the user experience.