People who practice SEO are made up of a very diverse group of people. There are old school SEO tactics and black hat techniques practiced by those who actually is the main reason why Google’s algorithms have evolved so rapid over the past few years.
Quality SEO strategies are born from a desire for long term success. Incremental improvements that can be measured are far better than once off boosts in rank and position, yielding short term results. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes there is a place for short term heavy duty campaigns, but there is wisdom in slowly achieving results that have durability.
The following 7 things I consider essential in any SEO strategy or plan:
1. Desire quality rather than quantity
This not only affects the content on your site, but every aspect of your seo strategy. Content should be unique and well written, yes grammar is actually important. It should appeal to your audience and be useful in some way or answer a question.
Putting up several unrelated random articles together requires less thought and planning, which in turn will not benefit the site in the long run. A better approach is to research what users want or need using various tools like the Google Keyword tool, Ubersuggest and or paid tools like Wordtracker or Wordstream.
Your link building should follow suit. Careless link building can actually cost you, and it’s more important than ever before to monitor the sites you link to. Selective linking and limiting the quantity of external links on a site is an important factor in building a highly reputable site.
2. Know your competition
This is a subject I covered in detail in an earlier post on how to perform competitive intelligence on your competition. Keeping tabs on what your competition is doing will be a key factor in creating a strategic seo strategy.
A few things to stay on top of are: What kinds of links are they acquiring, where are they getting those links, which sections of their site has the highest page rank, what is their social media strategy – if they have one. Where your competition ranks for search terms that you are targeting should be details you become intimately aware of.
3. Keyword Research and Trends
Do you follow trends online? Does your seo plan include how to take action on trending topics. Do you perform routine updates on where your competition ranks in relation to you? Extensive and diligent keyword research often reveals great possibilities for increasing visibility. These kinds of keywords are known among industry seo professionals as long tail keywords.
The long tail keywords are gold mines, despite the often low volumes of traffic. They do have much conversion rates than more general one or two word keywords. Think of actionable k low competition with high search volume. do talk about search patterns, trends, keyword research, ideal ways to target and generate content. Doing research can get cluttered fast, so get and stay organized.
4. Examine your own flaws and improve – introspection
Before you can improve, it is important to be willing to examine your web site’s current standing. SEO experts call this evaluation or analysis a web site audit. Good audits examine every facet of your website from duplicate titles, meta descriptions, broken links, invalid code and the list goes on.
There are some less common occurrences where some activity, whether inadvertent or not on the part of the overzealous seo/sem has resulted in getting penalized by Google. These are issues where measures should be taken to resolve them quickly.
Read in-depth article about remedying Google penalties. The speed of your site speed should play an important part in improving your site’s chances in Google rankings. Among Google’s metrics for a high quality site, site speed is an important factor. Remedying on page factors and site speed(for usability) is not very difficult.
Another area that you may want to pay close attention to, is the structure of your site. Is the arrangement of information logically laid out? Do related articles link to each other to increase the page rank of internal pages and also to connect the reader with relevant and useful information?
5. Measure Your Progress
You need to know how to measure and track performance. There are just too many variables that no one thing that you do, usually affects your ranking, conversion and visibility in search engines.
At the least you should create an excel spreadsheet and track what you do, when you do it, then track the outcome. Yes, this is painstakingly boring and at times it’s like watching paint dry. There are however excellent tools that are perfectly designed to keep track and build out reports for you.
Keep track of various sectors as you implement them then watch and check your ranking after implementation. When link building, its is important first to know whether your link has been indexed and if measuring impact, often its dofollow links that you are expecting any kind of movement on.
Acquiring links should always be considered as only PART of your SEO campaign. Logically you should be measuring on page factors and conversion rates, which in my opinion is the most important factor, since that is what drives sales. Gaining increased visibility in search engine rankings only gets your title and description of your site visible (for standard text based results), you still have to convince the user to actually click the link and then once they’re on your site, to stick around and buy your product or service.
6. Unique advertising methods – Don’t exclude the value of social media
Social media signals are becoming an increasingly important part of how many believe Google will measure rankings in the future. Company’s who are slow to adopt a strategy in this arena are lagging behind. Google plus authorship linking is what may become the strongest authicator for Google in the near future.
Now you can link content you create with your Google plus profile and as you create more content, that authorship becomes more valuable. Social media on the major players like, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google plus and LinkedIn should receive your ever increasing attention.
Some have claimed rising in rankings by just having great social media campaigns, although I have not found any conclusive evidence to this yet. Having a good balance that includes social media is a wise move and one that will serve you well down the road.
7. Progressive Enhancement for Mobile devices and location based search
According to Google, over 83% of shoppers now use their mobile devices to guide decisions to buy while shopping. Their primary means of accessing the internet is on through phones and the ease with which you can browse through Target and compare prices with Walmart are reasons why this should not be overlooked.
Your web site needs to look good and be functional on a mobile device, like an iPad or Android phones. Progressive enhancement is a term used by developers to progressively enhance a user’s web experience and a stepped approach.
In the realm of the mobile vs desktop world, this means that your site should not load heavy imagery or video as might be normal for the desktop user. Everyone, regardless of device or platform should be able to access and use your site with emphasis placed on layout and response time.
Location based search is increasingly becoming a factor to pay attention to and the good news is that there is still a lot of potential to do really well when targeting local search phrases.