Optimizing your website for Search Engines
To have your site optimized for the search engines means to attempt to have top placement in the results pages whenever a specific keyword is typed into the query box.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ?
SEO is the process of improving your website so that it attracts more visitors from search engines.
It is in the first step of your marketing strategy, which is to ATTRACT.
Search engines need to find the most relevant, useful, trustworthy answers.
They send “spiders” to crawl through the web searching for that content.
From that data, they create a list of results.
They rank the results in order of the popularity and authority of the websites.
YOUR GOAL IS TO BE IN THE TOP ORGANIC RESULTS. By organic, we mean "natural", not paid for. Not the first ones with a small yellow "Ad" icon under the title. Everybody knows those ones are paid for, so most people will just go straight to the first natural link.
Spider-driven search engines such as Google®, Yahoo!® and MSN® use "robots" or "crawlers" to score websites across the Internet and give them a placement based on how relevant they are.
The placement is based on many factors, such as
link popularity
density
frequency of keywords in page content
HTML code
site themes
Etc..
Here are two of the most important factors:
Link Popularity When Google spiders the Web, it finds sites by traveling through links. The more sites that link to you, the more important the engines believe your content to be. Read my blog post on implementing a link-building strategy.
Page Content & keywords Search engine spiders can only spider through text. They will use the content on your site to decide how highly your site will be ranked for specific keyword phrases. Keyword research is critical to obtaining natural search engine placement.
So, what should be your SEO Strategy ?
1. DEVELOP A CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY & TARGET AN AUDIENCE.
I am not going to write too much on it on this post. At this stage, it is something that you should already have done.
But your first step of course is to target the right audience and use content to drive profitable behaviors from that audience.
Don't go into SEO & keyword before you have deeply worked on this stage.
Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to, it's your buyer personas (fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers).
Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.
Here are 2 interesting articles on how to develop a content marketing strategy, by Content Marketing Institute, and on how to determine your buyer personas, by Hubspot.
Your content strategy should be focused around your top keywords.
2. KEYWORDS.
You will need to shape your website content so it contains the right keywords.
You will need to know how many people are searching for your keyword phrases and what kind of competition you are facing when attempting to obtain a top spot in the search results.
You can make the content more relevant for the search engine by incorporating high-impression keywords.
Find your main keywords, high-impression and relevant. Make a list of keywords your buyer persona will look for.
Extend to alternatives
Decide which ones will work best for your website.
Avoid overstuffing keywords into website content
Each keyword that you select should be researched properly using online tools such as
I go deeper into your KEYWORDS strategy on this blog post.
3. GENERATE POWERFUL BACKLINKS TO YOUR SITE.
4. IMPROVE THE HTML STRUCTURE OF YOUR WEBSITE.
This is basic SEO. It is improving your HTML code so it is optimized for search engines.
I won't go into details here, as this article is not aimed for developers but for business owners. If you don't do your website yourself, your developer or the SEO you hired should be doing that.
Here is a great guide to basic SEO by Google.
But to sum it up, here are a few critical things to do:
Create unique, accurate page titles
Make use of the "description" meta tag
Improve the structure of your URLs
Write better anchor text
Use mostly text for navigation
Put an HTML site map page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file
Optimize your use of images (Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text)
Use heading tags appropriately
Restrict crawling where it's not needed with robots.txt
Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links
5. DO HIGH-LEVEL ANALYSIS VIA GOOGLE ANALYTICS.
Make use Google Analytics and Website optomizer to measure the outcome your efforts.
Google Analytics can track changes in search volume over time.
You will know which pages and content attracts the most visitors, and the keywords they type to enter the website.
You will know more about which visitors you are attracting.
The information gathered can help you fine-tune your content and increase conversion rates.
6. GET YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE-READY.
In 2016, it is critical that you have a mobile version of your website.
Indeed, in 2015, there was a major Google update known as Mobilegeddon or Mobilepocalyspe; Google has released a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm.
Use this tool fron Google Developers, an online test to see if your website is mobile-friendy.
So, you need a responsive design, being set up on a mobile subdomain or use dynamic serving.
7. MOVE YOUR WEBSITE TO HTTPS.
Google wants you to move your site to HTTPS so badly that they are giving a ranking boost to websites that are secure.
8. HAVE A LOOK AT THE ENTIRE LIST OF GOOGLE's RANKING FACTORS.
Here is an amazing list made by Backlinko.
If there was a simple way to sum everything up, I would say, combine content marketing and SEO strategy. Read this great post on the subject on entrepreneur.com.
I hope I helped you understand better what SEO is all about and how to implement a solid strategy. Don't hesitate to comment or email me if you have any further question.
Anna B.
