5 Most Important Things In SEO

From quality content to social media the face of SEO is rapidly changing and expanding. If you want to keep up you will need to learn a few new tricks as well as relearn and reevaluate a few old ones.

1- Quality Content and Users Come First

I am sure that every single one of you have heard that content is king on more then one occasion, but the fact is content is not king, the user is actually king, and content is the homage that we all must pay to our king.

Your visitors want unique, well written and informative content that is easy to read and understand, engaging, entertaining, and relevant to the keyword that they used to find you. They want to know more about you and your company, products or services so that they can trust you and build a relationship with you. But your visitors are not the only reason why you should only use fresh, unique and high quality content.

Although your users are the main reason why high quality unique content is the cornerstone of your site, there is another important reason, the search engines. The search engines use very sophisticated algorithms to weed out duplicates so that only the most relevant pages are presented to the users. In other words well written and above all, unique content will help to push your site up the ranks.

• Unique content: Try to use fresh unique information or at least write it in a unique way.
• Quality over quantity always: If you have a choice between a single well written informative page or a hundred hard to read but keyword rich pages then always choose the single well written one.
• Update, Update, Update: Fresh is the word. The fresher and newer your content is the higher you will rank in the search engines.

2- Optimize Internal Linking Structure & On-Page Factors

As SEO experts and webmasters you should already be aware of how important it is to create an internal link structure that is operational and makes sense to your end users as well as the “search engine spiders.” Unfortunately it is a facet that is often overlooked by webmasters. A website that is well linked internally will have a much better chances at ranking high in the search engines.

• Create relevant categories and sub categories
• Make sure your site is accessible: You should always make sure that all of your most important pages are easy to reach and no more than two clicks away from your home page.
• Use no-follow: If you have a site with several unimportant pages then a no follow tag can ensure that the “spiders” do not use those pages for ranking.
• Create a sitemap: Creating a sitemap can help the search engines discover any changes that you make to your site faster.
• Repair broken links: A broken link is not good for your user or the “spiders” make it a habit to check and repair your links regularly.
• Use breadcrumbs and pagination wisely: If your site is small (only 5 or six pages) then you really do not need to overwhelm your visitor with extra choices in navigation. However, larger sites with a lot of information or products may do well to separate sub-categories via either pagination or breadcrumbs.

One long standing issue is that pagination can potentially bury products pages deeper making it next to impossible for the search engines to “crawl” and rank these pages. The solution? Add anchor text to your home page and other pages that link to these “deeper” pages or use external linking from relevant sites.

On page factors also play an important role in the way your site is perceived by both your visitors and search engines such as Google. Below you will find a list of what each page should include to be perfectly balanced.

• Make sure your content is relevant to your keyword or words.
• Include your keyword in your URL
• Include your keyword in your title tag
• Include your keyword several times within the body of your text
• Include your keyword in your image alt text
• Make sure your content is unique and relevant to your keyword.
• Make sure the backlinks for your important pages go back to your homepage, category page and subcategory page.

3- Convertible Keyword Research

Are your keywords getting plenty of clicks but not much conversion? Your keywords may rank great for natural search but if they are not exactly what your visitors are looking for then your risk having a problem with bounce rates. Therefore you do not just need to find and utilize the top keywords for your niche but you also need to find a way to discover which keywords are resulting in actual time spent on the page.

• When using Google Analytics use the advanced filters located at the bottom of the page. Try to filter your keyword report by bounce to identify which keywords are driving traffic but do not result in getting visitors to stick around.
• Test your keywords: Once you have identified the pages that have a high bounce rate use a tool like Google Website Optimizer to see if it possible to improve performance.
• Use “long-tails:” Need help finding good long-tailed keywords to work with? Try the Google Suggestion tool. Just type your keyword into a Google search bar and look over what pops up.
• Use tools such as Google Adwords and Wordtracker to make your research easier but think outside the box a bit with the various search site suggestion tools as well.

4- Include Social Media in the Process

To me the World Wide Web is a vast desert that stretches forever as far as the eye can see and within that desert are trillions upon trillions of tiny grains of sand which are websites. So how is a single person able to find one particular tiny grain of sand; one website in this vast sea of websites? Search engines? Yes but search engines are not the only signpost in this desert.

Today, social networks are becoming more and more important to internet users from all walks of life, let’s face it, even Grandma has a Facebook page and knows what a “tweet” is, so is it any wonder that the line between SEO and social media is becoming blurred? The name of the game is driving visitors to your site and joining several social media sites and adding links to your home page can greatly increase your site’s popularity.

• Facebook has over 600 million members, use it.
• Tweet, retweet, engage, provide something useful to your followers
• Join social media sites that are relevant to your keyword/site and that you are going to become involved with. A Twitter account that never “tweets” is useless.

Does all of this sound too simplistic? The truth is social media and SEO are often perceived as much more complex then they need to be. There are literally 4 steps to creating a social media marketing scheme that compliments and enhances your SEO strategy.

• Listen: Use tools such as Pulse of the Tweeters to find out what everyone is talking about. Find out where your target audience is gathering, identify the social media keyword relevant to your business, identify those who are influential in your topic, and use SERPs.
• Content: Content such as images, audio and video can be promoted via social networking.
• Socialize: Learn how to interact with your customers. Ask yourself a few questions and get the answers.

What do your customers do on the social web? How do they find information and share? Take the time to actually grow your network. Thirty minutes or so a day following, friending, liking and updating on a daily basis can snowball into real conversions for your site. There is no substitute for actual interaction with your potential visitors. Don’t forget to link-back!

• Measure: Use tools such as Wildfire Social Media Monitor, BlogPulse, and others to measure how you are doing.

5- Go For Quality Backlinks

As stated earlier, one of the criteria your site will be judged on is popularity, backlinks are another way of rapidly increasing that but only if you seek out and work for quality backlinks.
The hardest part of link building is finding relevant and high quality places to link to and I am not going to lie to you and say that it is easy or fast but it can be fun.

Here are a few ways to get those links:

• Become a guest blogger: Contact several relevant sites and ask. Send out an email and basically ask if you can guest post on their site in exchange for a link or three.
• Think outside the box: For instance you can create a high quality Word Press theme, add your link to the anchor text in the footer and distribute it for free.

Remember the rules of backlinks though:

• Choose quality places to create backlinks: The secret to backlinks is not in quantity it is in quality. You will get a better ranking with 10 quality backlinks from sites that are relevant then you will with thousands of backlinks from any site you happen to come across. Quality backlinks bring more visitors: If your site sells burglar alarms and there is a link to it from a true crime website then it is likely that the person who clicked the link is interested in your burglar alarms.

The secret to a successful online business is correctly done and diligent SEO practices, after all if you consider that the internet is like a desert with each website a grain of sand then you may just begin to understand how important it is to create a signpost that will lead people to the right grain of sand, yours.

Author: Alex Petrovic