SEO is always changing. As soon as you think you’re caught up, you’re behind again. This means that you must adapt to the changes as they come or your site will be buried. The first step to a successful SEO strategy is to stay connected to SEO resources that can keep you up to date with the latest trends and techniques. You don’t want to be an SEO expert yesterday!
Technical SEO is exactly that: very technical. These are a collection of smaller things that result in big dividends. Here are some of the technical SEO settings you should work on:
Page titles: The title of your webpage and what’s displayed as the clickable link on a search engine results page (SERP). Page titles are a significant reason why your website page shows up in SERPs. Make sure your title is relevant and click-worthy.
Meta descriptions: A brief description of your web page that will display below the link on a SERP. Your meta description is a brief pitch to your audience to get them clicking through and engaging with your content. Don’t take your meta-descriptions for granted.
Alt-text: Let Google know about an image and what’s in the image. The alt-text doesn’t have to be overly descriptive but there is no character limit when it comes to alt-text, so as long as it's relevant to the image be as descriptive as you want, using as many relevant keywords as you can. This will be taken into consideration and will help you rank your images as well.
Keywords: Adding keywords to your page or blog for words that you want to pull traffic from. Keyword research is important to understand the opportunities you have to come up on the first page of google. Don’t focus only on the keyword, think about the intention behind the keyword. What are users trying to find by searching for keyword x, y, or z? You can use tools like Moz’s keyword explorer, Ahrefs, SEMrush, search console, and many more.
301 redirects: As your site evolves and pages are added and removed, be sure to keep up with redirecting old page links to new relevant pages. Google rewards websites that offer their users a positive user experience. Clicking through to a 404 page is not a positive experience.
Submitting your site map: Submitting a sitemap to Google helps Google understand the organization of your website. It’s important to give them a clear path for how your website function to rank for what you want.
More information about technical SEO in our SEO guide.
Local SEO represents your presence on local searches. Things like appearing in a search on Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and other location-based directories. It’s the factor that decides whether or not you show up when someone searches “Restaurants near me” or “Car Repair Sarasota.”
How do you get your business noticed in local searches?
The practice of link building is essentially building a network of links that scour your website linking to different pages, as well as building relationships with industry experts and partners that reward you with links from their site content to yours. This is another way to show Google that you have good content on certain topics and you are an authority on those topics.
Links come in two forms:
Another good way to produce solid link building is by using Pillar Pages and topic clusters. These are pages (usually in longer form) dedicated to one specific topic that link out to more content related to that topic (usually blogs that touch on something more specific on that topic). It’s a great SEO tactic that also helps you organize content for your users. Instead of having multiple blogs scattered all over your site, create Pillar pages for your most important services and products; Then create more specific content around those pillars.
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Don’t worry if you don’t already know what Schema is, most people don't. Schema is a set of tags used in HTML that act as helping hand for search engines when they crawl your site and put in on their SERPs. It helps guide the search engine to the information you want in the snippet that appears under your URL in those SERPs.
Keywords are words you want to focus on and pull traffic from. Including these words in your content and website, in a conversational and organic way, will increase your presence when those words are searched. By understanding the intent behind the keywords, you’ll be able to create content that offers value to those searching for it, which will increase your site’s traffic and engagement.
SEO is the key to the heart of a search engine. Woo them with great content, the right links, and a lot of work. But that work pays off when quality traffic starts to flow in. Watch the full series now and check out last week's episode on redesigning and optimizing websites!