Jay Leonard“Want to ensure that your blog or website continues to drive organic search traffic and avoid Google algorithm penalties caused by inadvertent SEO problems?”
Any blogger or business that relies on the Internet as a source of revenue should spend some time, each week, on search optimization.
SEO changes all the time. Bloggers and small businesses that want to stay on top of search optimization need to keep tabs on search industry news, latest techniques, analytics, and more.
Weekly SEO top 5
This SEO list for bloggers and small business will show you five things you should do at least once a week in order to ensure that your blog or website is driving as much Web traffic as possible.
In many cases, the SEO or search optimization related tasks mentioned in this list should be performed more than once a week.
1. Create content
Add content to your site at least once a week. If you rely on revenue from the Internet then it is definitely worthwhile creating content on a more regular basis, as a high authority, highly ranked niche website can bring great ROI (Return on Investment) online.
New content must be original and relevant to your blog or business niche. In addition, you might consider doing some SEO keyword research to further enhance the rankings of your content in search.
Learn more about SEO, content and keyword research with these articles:
- The 3 most important small business search engine optimization tips, 2012
- 5 expert SEO tips to dominate Google search
- SEO basics: Increase website traffic with long-tail Google keywords
- How to research SEO keywords: Five SEO tips from top SEO experts
2. Monitor analytics
Analytical data, provided by a service like Google analytics, can tell you a great deal about how a blog or website performs. In particular, it is important to pay close attention to the following aspects:
- Overall traffic volumes: This metric can provide strong evidence for how well or poorly various marketing and SEO efforts are paying off.
- Traffic originating from organic search: This provides insight into how well your blog or website ranks in the SERPs( Search Engine Results Pages).
- Top content: This can tell you which posts bring the most traffic and allows you to tailor advertising or marketing on these pages, or work to help other pages move up in the rankings.
- Conversions: If you have set goals, analytics can provide data about how well your blog or site is converting traffic to meet predefined objectives, such as newsletter signups or product purchases.
- Bounce Rate: A high bounce rate may indicate poor or confusing web design, or poor quality content. A low bounce rate is a good indication that your blog or site is engaging readers well.
To learn more about analytics and how to use analytical data, I recommend reading the following articles:
- Five awesome tips to extract valuable SEO secrets from Google analytics data
- How to double your search traffic using SEO, Webmaster tools and Google analytics
- Five ways to make more money using analytics
3. Check Webmaster Tools
While analytics focuses on providing information about visitors and traffic, Webmaster Tools provides information that Google knows about webpages, site structure, content, and even you, as the author.
In particular, the following metrics are very useful:
- Crawl Errors under Health can indicate if Google is accessing your site correctly
- Malware under Health can alert you to the presence of malicious, foreign content or code
- Search queries under Traffic provides insight into what search keywords Google ranks your blog or site on
- HTML Improvements under Optimization highlights many of the most common webpage structural problems that can affect the user experience
- Author stats under Labs gives great insight into how your content is shared and viewed online even if it is published on a different domain
You can learn more about implementing Author Stats by reading Google Webmaster tools releases Author stats.
4. Check & interact on social networks
One of the most important metrics that Google uses to determine site and page rankings in search results is the number of natural backlinks a site or webpage has.
Social marketing and interaction via the major social networks is the best way to build up a following, trust and authority (collectively termed influence). The more people talk about your content, blog or site, the higher Google will rank that content, leading to additional exposure and visibility in the search results.
Be careful to share content only where appropriate and relevant to do so. Many social networks are inundated with spam and don’t look kindly on “self promotion“. There is a comprehensive, and growing, list of social network bookmarks that are freely available on seo entrepreneur’s dashboard.
5. Check Google blogs and forums
Last, but certainly not least, it is important to find and follow Google’s major sources of news and information. Often, for example, Google employees will forewarn the public of impending algorithm updates through blogs or social media like Twitter.
If your blog or website suddenly drops out of the search results, and you are already aware that there was, say, a Panda algorithm refresh at the same time, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort finding out what went wrong, since you already know the likely culprit.
I would recommend the following:
Do you regularly work on SEO? What SEO tips and tricks can you suggest to help other people stay on top of Google search results, drive quality traffic and keep their businesses thriving online? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments or join me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ to continue the debate.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Great post David! As an SEO consultant, I always tell client’s to focus on content and be consistent with it. With the introduction of so many updates to search algorithms, content now plays a huge role an is so important for engaging users. I think a good point to remember is write your content for users, and not search engines. Excellent post!
I completely agree with your points. I work for a crowdsourcing blog writing service called Blogmutt and one of the top reasons people come to us is to boost their SEO. This is one of the largest challenges that small businesses face online. And, a great way to do this is with a company blog but writing is takes lots of time and can be difficult. I hope to read more by you soon!
Great post David.
Too many see SEO as a set and forget kind of thing.
Look at it this way. Usain Bolt is widely considered the fastest man on the planet. In SEO terms it means he ranks number 1 on Google. Now, the way a lot of people do SEO they will stop working on SEO as soon as they get to the top spot. If Usain Bolt worked the same way he would have stopped training as soon as he won his first olympic medal. If he had done that it’s pretty safe to say he wouldn’t have come close to participating in another olympic competition!
Getting to the top is just the beggining. To stay there you have to keep working on your SEO.
This article is a great find even though from last year. Its still relevant for SEO (even after all the algorithm updates) and we’ll surely be sharing this with our more ‘hands on’ clients.