Search Engine Optimization, a means of improving your ranking organically to increase website traffic and ultimately sales. The search engines match search queries with website pages based upon relevance and authority. Each page despite being a part of an overall website is also a stand alone with the focus on core keyword phrases and a unique keyword rich title. There are so many different strategies that are discussed to obtain a number one ranking, how to improve your search engine rankings and mistakes to avoid that it is almost overwhelming as which will work for your company and fast? As a small business owner, selecting keywords, writing content around the keywords and waiting for the search engines to crawl and rank is just not enough anymore. While you are waiting to be crawled and ranked, your competitor or the guy next door who just opened and went live with their website, is waiting to push you to page 2. The algorithms change, the way that we search has changed and the information that is captured about how we search has changed. The search engines capture our query behavior and provide results based upon what we have searched. Where do you even begin to start creating a search friendly website that is optimized for local search, mobile search, universal search and also optimized for Bing?
The first step in your optimization strategy is research of core keywords that directly relate to your company and industry. Lower searched terms with a low difficulty to rank for, commonly known as longtail keywords should also be considered as we know that people do not search for one word in their queries. Once you have your identified some core keywords, it is time to head over to a keyword suggestion tool (free and paid are both very viable options). While you are compiling your keyword list, keep in mind the data that the search engines capture is about how people search.
Search Behavior and Impact on Results
Pages are indexed and ranked for each search query based upon relevance and authority. What if the user is searching for shoes, then wedged shoes, then open toe shoes – is not to far fetched to think that the next query may be open toed wedged shoes. This consecutive search behavior needs to be considered when you are determining which keywords are the most important to your company and industry. What is the national progression of how someone would search? This is not too say that a page is needed for each consecutive search term as you will find that you are ranking for these longtail keywords due to the search engines tracking the behavior of how people search. There is great opportunity to analyze these results and see where you can push these rankings higher.
6 Search Engine Optimization Tips
1.Keywords. Keywords are really just words that are descriptors of what you do or what you feel that you should be ranked for. Keywords are ranked by relevancy and are the clues for indexing. This is why so much importance is given to an unique title for each page, content rich keywords, header tags and the biggest one of all the inbound links. The search engine crawlers are begging for new content to push out in search results and need a clue as to what you are talking about.
2. Content. We hear over and over that content is king which yes it generally is however, if the content is not built around the keywords, not helpful to the audience and asking the reader to do something, it is useless. Amber Naslund says this best in her 9 Social Media Topics That Need To Die article:
“… Creating content is not what wins you the prize. It’s not enough to write something, or populate a blog, or create a video. Content is worth precisely zero until it’s being found, consumed, and then used to do something. It needs to drive people to action—sharing, buying, building, interacting.
And guess what, stargazers? If your content isn’t propelling people to act on something that eventually delivers something of value back to your business (provided you’re talking content marketing and not outright contribution for charitable purpose), it’s a time sink. That makes it decidedly less than king.”
3. Synonyms. For years now Google has been able to recognize synonyms but with mixed and not so very accurate results. Now, synonyms are becoming more important as the distinction has been made as to what synonyms should appear in search results. Synonyms are also being bolded just like the search terms.
4. Misspellings. Ever see a webpage that has words misspelled and you shake you head wondering how they could not have seen that the word is misspelled? Well, we know that that there are many words that are commonly misspelled and ranking for them is key. Yes you will rank for them already as you can see when you evaluate the search terms that you were found for but think of how much traffic you may be missing that is not being sent to your site for common misspellings?
5.Keyword Distribution. Many say that the best place for keywords is in the first paragraph and in the first few sentence. This makes sense when we think about giving the spiders a clue what the page is about however, as the spiders are indexing the page, the keywords need to be properly distributed in equal intervals throughout the entire page. Also, keywords need to be near the other keywords you are looking to rank for on that page.
6. Optimize Key Web Pages. Select your most important pages and perform an audit to be sure you are optimizing with on-page factors, analyzing keyword density, synonyms (of course) linking internally and externally. You will still optimize the other pages however more attention is paid to the core pages that are the meat of what you do.
Search engine optimization continues to evolve and what worked yesterday has been refined today and your competitor just may live in today. The basics of knowing to place your address as it contains your city name on every page, to ensuring that the information is accurate for all directory listings to rank for local search, to understanding the importance of building quality links, tagging photos and never building a site in completely in flash are great starting points but are not going to get the job done. Of course, your blog is going to help tremendously with rankings as the search engines are constantly being fed new content to index and share with users. Search engine optimization, rankings, etc take work and need to be monitored to see where you can improve and bump up rankings.
What has your experience been with using synonyms and misspelling? Rankings better or have you not see a change?
photo credit: martin.canchola
