Fascinating content is the solution for stellar search engine ranking results, whether you are jumping into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the first time with a new website or you’re seeking to regain your website’s rank. Populate your web pages with text and media to answer your target customer’s questions, and you’ve nailed it.
Sounds simple? The trick is that SEO is dynamic—Your rank may be on the first page of Google search results today, but maybe not tomorrow. Your success depends upon whether you regularly refresh your website with interesting new information that’s relevant to your visitors, or whether your competition does a better job of this.
How do you keep up with the demands of posting new and relevant information? Turn to the top local agency for SEO (that’s us) to create the perfect content.
We’ll give you a few tips to get started, in the meantime.
To celebrate 20 years of the Internet, here’s a primer, designed for successful results today’s world of SEO:
1. Your content must be goal-driven.
Have a purpose for creating meaningful information. Why are you publishing your website home page, online product catalog, blog article, infographic, or video? If your answer is, “to get a high Google ranking,” go back to the drawing board.
Design everything you publish online for human consumption, for your reader’s education and enjoyment. Mold your content to fit your target customer, just the clients who want and need your products and services.
Google will take notice. Specify goals for your content, producing web pages filled with relevant,“ sticky” content where your website visitors stick to your website and delve deep into your message.
How does your content deserve that top rank in the Google results? Lay the groundwork for good SEO practices by following a measurable goal, such as:
• To increase product sales by highlighting how our products are the one and only answer our customer’s needs
• To increase inquiries and consultation appointments with proof of our experience and trustworthy reputation
• To increase the numbers of email sign-ups through offers of educational download information to help customers make the best product purchase from our catalog
When your content is meaningful to website visitors, your content will be meaningful to Google and all search engines, too.
2. Target your perfect customers with the best keyword phrases.
Create a competitive strategy around the keywords that you choose. Need help with choosing keywords? Discover “How to Research SEO Keywords Like a Pro”.
Armed with your keyword phrases, select the best user-friendly internal URLs (web page addresses). For instance, which would you prefer to click on?
https://YourCompanyName/pfc-37
or
https://YourCompanyName/groovy-guide
For more clickability, Google’s Matt Cutts recommends confining the URL extension to between 3 and 5 words. (Not https://YourCompanyName.com/groovy-guide-that-even-your-grandmother-will-love)
Use your main keyword phrase in the first paragraph of your text, within the first 100 words or so, while ensuring that the text is natural for any website visitor to read. Don’t try to force or stuff a keyword phrase into the content. Good grammar and punctuation trump keyword placement.
Sprinkle your content with semantically related keyword phrases—text that includes words associated with your industry, business sector, products, and services.
3. Include optimized tags.
This is the information provided for the search engine bots that crawl the web to locate new information to include in the search engine results. Your human readers don’t see these optimized tags unless they know how to look for it. Without this information, automated web crawlers don’t know that you’ve posted brilliant content.
Supply the following information to your IT guru to insert on your web pages, or do it yourself:
• Optimized Title Tag—Include your target keyword phrase and limit it to 60 characters
•Optimized Meta Description—Include keywords that encourage completing a call-to-action, and limit the description to less than 160 characters
• Optimized H1 Tag—This is the actual title of your page or article that your human visitors read, and it includes your target keyword phrase. It can be identical to the Optimized Title Tag.
4. Add internal and external links.
Hyperlinks provide resources for website visitors to learn more about your company and offerings.
Internal links posted on your website take the visitor to another page within your site. Use internal links to offer visitors reasons to take advantage of your calls to action.
Outbound, or external links were once feared, due to the concern that visitors are guided away from your website and brand. Linking to informative sources and business partner websites strengthens your reputation—Visitors believe you are the ultimate authority for your subject and your industry. Choose links that guide your potential customers, helping to answer their questions while preventing them from landing on your competitors’ websites.
Add links to your social networks, too, and insert widgets on your website that display your most recent posts. Post social share buttons to encourage website visitors to create a buzz about your useful information, products, and deals to their own networks of followers. Think of this as free advertising and great SEO!
5. Ensure that your page loads quickly and is viewable on multiple devices.
A major ingredient to gaining a successful mobile search rank position is how fast the pages on your website load. Check that your website design template is running on the most recent update and optimize images on your site. Learn more about enhancing your search appeal with a mobile-friendly website.
6. Don’t skimp on the content.
How many words should a web page or blog article contain? Our rule of thumb: Use enough words to go into depth to answer your website visitor’s questions clearly and solve their problems. Your content must steal the spotlight away from your competitors and put you on center stage.
Search engines reward websites with great content by placing them at the top of the results page for your keyword phrases. Google penalizes sites that resort to:
• Redirects and Cloaking—Giving Google a different view of your website than your offering for human website visitors
• Keyword Stuffing—Repeating the same keyword phrases throughout the text
• Hidden Text—Text that only Google bots can see and is invisible to human readers (white font against a white background, for instance)
• Unnatural links—Sending your web page visitors to websites that are unrelated to your subject at hand smells of taking money as bribes to benefit other website owner’s SEO agendas.
• Broken links and evidence of hacking—Avoiding the regular website housekeeping chores of ensuring links are still good, backing up your site, and updating the security marks your site as old and ignored.
• Spammy user comments, spammy hosting companies, and spammy hard-sell content—“Spam, spam, spam, lovely spam,” as the Monty Python troupe sang
• Copied material—Duplicating information found elsewhere on the ‘net sends Google rankings into a free fall
Why would Google want to include a site anywhere in their search engine results that resorted to these tactics?
Follow the rules and avoid any reason for Google to drop your site from their search engine results. But your triumph will only be temporary if you post content on your website only to forget about it. Web pages that retain stale content plummet as competitors post innovative, new material on their sites. The internet is dynamic and ever changing, and so are the search engine results.
Here at Moore Than SEO, we recognize you have more important things to attend to than constantly come up with new content to keep up with your competitors at bay. You could do your homework, or you could make the easy choice and partner with us.
Learn why Moore Than SEO is the top local agency in the greater Fresno and Clovis areas, and then give us a call at 559-978-4096. We work with you to build a campaign strategy that delivers quantifiable results-driven social media content that engages. We don’t stop there—We continue to adjust content for maximum effect. Contact us today to get started.
