“SEO is a noun, verb, adjective.” – Todd Malicoat
Yes, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a broad subject that encompasses a wide-range of activities. Because of this, and due to quite a bit of positive feedback on my first post regarding this topic, I felt that Part II was necessary. If you haven’t had a chance to read Part I of this series, I recommend that you do so prior to reading further for alignment purposes.
In this post, I would like to elaborate on the two major categories of SEO, along with providing you with additional recommendations for improving your site’s search engine rankings.
In essence, all SEO techniques will fall into these two groups: 1) onsite optimization 2) offsite optimization.
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Onsite Optimization:
Onsite optimization refers to the practices used during the development of any website. For those unaware, SEO professionals follow strict rules and a meticulous set of guidelines when developing websites in an effort to make them search engine friendly.
To aid you in this quest, I’ve listed my top 10 recommendations for onsite optimization:
- Choose a good website architecture, such as WordPress, that incorporates the latest tools and software allowing your site to be crawled easily.
- Ensure your domain name, including the title and pages of your site, contain certain keywords that you want optimized.
- You could also use SEO tools, such as Xenu and Quake, to analyze your selected keywords density and ensure that those keywords are easily crawled by search engine spiders.
- Select descriptive text for all of your site’s contents.
- Do your best to put your selected keywords in headings; alternative (ALT) tags; anchor tag; videos; images; linking structures; meta-descriptions, etc.
- Always put the end-user in mind by creating a site that not only loads fast but is also filled with high-quality content that’s easily accessible.
- Update your site contents frequently.
- Your URL’s should be as brief and concise as possible.
- The content of your pages should also contain the same keywords that were used during the optimization process listed above.
- Another option is to use plugins, such as WordPress SEO by Yoast, to help you easily improve your site(s) SEO.
One of the main reasons why I’ve highlighted WordPress is because it’s an all-in-one package. Let me explain. At its’ core, SEO is best used to upgrade content, including the associated coding, to improve the visibility of any site on search engines. In general, you want to optimize a site’s entire contents as “search engine only index text.” Therefore, WordPress is a great candidate for SEO because not only does it allow you to do this but also has other features beneficial for SEO, such as the following:
- Create a website, including pages, and directories.
- Allows you to install new themes, along with updating pages and directories.
- Generate website links that are the same as the title page or an article, post, etc.
- You can easily install a variety of plugins that will make it really easy for anyone to optimize their site and improve SEO.
So if you’re not already using WordPress, you may want to look at this popular platform.
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Offsite Optimization:
As for offsite optimization, it refers to the practices used to not only propagate but also proliferate your site’s contents over the Internet in an effort to increase traffic and rankings.
Here are my top 10 suggestions for improving offsite optimization:
- Do some research and select a reputable hosting company that meets your site’s needs based on available resources.
- Make sure that your site has a static IP address.
- Submit your blog and feeds.
- You should also include forum and blog commenting, if possible.
- Use Article Distribution, such as “SubmitYourArticle” to easily share your content on other sites.
- Create quality back-links on other reputable sites, thus increasing your page ranking.
- Do your best to list your site in as many directories as possible.
- You could also get “dot gov” and “dot edu” links as well.
- Allow social bookmarking of your site, including it’s contents.
- Periodically, conduct market research to check shares of your website content on different media platforms to know where you stand.
In today’s digital age, a large percentage of your focus should be geared towards offsite optimization using social networking and online communities, groups, etc. Sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, enables people to share valuable content with their contacts, thus increasing the potential of other visitors coming to your site. Therefore, it would behoove you to place links, along with creating pages on these popular social networking sites as well.
As for groups, you could join Yahoo, MSN, Google, and post comments within these groups to get additional exposure – make sure to include a reference link back to your site. Another option is to use online communities and discussion boards to not only comment but also advertise your site to others. Please ensure that you use reputable and trusted sites for Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Remember, the “Panda Update” released by Google was designed to improve the end-user’s experience by downgrading low quality-sites that don’t provide value. In parallel, it also helps to provide high-quality sites with better rankings. Sites that have original content, in-depth articles, thoughtful analysis and comments, along with frequent updates are usually ranked better.
To end this post, I would like to leave you with a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk, an entrepreneur and investor, who stated that “content is king, but marketing is the queen that runs the household.” With this mind, do your best to market your site and follow the guidelines mentioned above and you’ll be on your way to effective SEO.
The post Keep Your Search Engines Running – SEO Strategies (Part II) appeared first on SuccessPenPal.