Many helpful tips have been shared about the new search engine optimization (SEO) rules following Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. What used to work might not anymore, and some methods could hurt your website’s ranking. If you’re using an inbound marketing strategy, ensure you know the latest SEO best practices and avoid outdated techniques, which I will cover in my next post, that could lead to penalties for your site.
SEO Best Practices
- Make it responsive – Google suggests using a responsive design for your website and blog since it provides the same URL for content to all users, no matter what device they are using. This conserves resources for both your site and Google’s crawlers. A responsive design makes it simpler for users to engage with, share, and link to your content, while also assisting Google’s algorithms in assigning the right indexing properties for that content.
- Create quality content – SEO always includes the statement “create quality content”. Great, but what is quality content? It’s content that educates and entertains your audience, adds value to your website and encourages visitors to share it with others. Quality content is determined by intimately knowing your target audience and providing content that is useful to them in some way. And yes, quality content also means grammatically correct with no typos. But one thing is for certain – creating quality content is not an option. It is the marketing fuel that accelerates your visibility, determines your reputation, trust and authority and drives more search engine traffic.
- Build online authority – Google Authorship will become a powerful ranking metric and may be more important in how well your content ranks than other on-page SEO techniques (although they are still important as well). Google Authorship displays your Google+ profile picture and links to your profile on posts you have written, enabling Google to better verify the ownership and authenticity of the content. Associating your profile with content you’ve written increases trust in the link, while building credibility in you as an author and increasing click through rates. If you search for “Facebook Page Tagging”, you will get similar results to those shown below. The result with the picture will generate more clicks than the post without because the of the human association with the content.
Google Authorship & Search Results
- Stick with sensible on-page optimization – Although the goal is to write content targeted at the human, there are some specific things you can do to help the search engines understand how to better index each page of your site by implementing on-page optimization. Spend time on the SEO title and description of each page and post of your website. This is what shows up in the search engine results as you see above. The title will catch the searcher’s attention first and should contain the main keyword phrase. The description should be a concise, keyword rich statement and call to action to encourage the reader to click through to your website. Adding your keywords naturally to your writing, linking to other quality content, adding alt and title tags to your images and formatting your content for easy reading will add to the quality of your content.
- Increase your social activity – Google is now using social signals to help determine search engine rankings for content. Writing and optimizing content for your blog is no longer enough to gain visibility in the top of the search results. Now it is important to make it easy for people to share your content via social networks. Add social sharing buttons on content you want shared, including your images. Check out Foobox – a responsive image lightbox that adds social sharing buttons to your images.
In many ways, these changes to how search engines index and rank web pages is a benefit to most small business owners. Optimizing your content is now a more common sense exercise than one of how to game the system. The next time you get a sales call from an SEO company that guarantees top ranking in Google, make sure to ask if they implement these five SEO best practices.
What SEO best practices are you now implementing and have I left any off the list?