Search engine optimization (SEO) is required to make your website worthwhile on its own in the WWW universe. Yet, all too many companies and start-ups push this important task towards the back of the to-do list. Although it’s somewhat understandable, it is highly undesirable if you own a website. SEO is like building your credibility to a group of strangers. That takes time. SEO takes time. The sooner you start the better. After all, you will eventually think about or be sold on SEO prior to going out of business, so why not look at making your website SEO friendly now? As the old saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second best time is NOW!
Let me instill just why you need to start now! Search Engine Optimization is based on textual content .. why? .. because users type textual content into a search box when they need or want to know about something (soon there will be voice content, but that is very likely just translated to text content that is then read back to the user after finding a textual answer). Generating quality content takes time. It could take lots of time. Here’s the kicker, you may take lots of time to create great quality content .. and if you’re not smart about your SEO steps, it could take weeks for Google to add it to the index, and if it’s not in the index, then it’s not quite SEO yet? (Sort of like: If a tree falls in the middle of the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?)
Think about that .. if you want to implement SEO for your website, it makes sense to do it now and do it aggressively, so that the results of your work can be reflected more rapidly in the future on Google, whenever Google decides that is. After all, you can’t have organic search results if you’re not in the almighty Google Index, or any other Index (Bing) for that matter.
Here we provide a 13 step guide to implementing online SEO and making your website search engine friendly. Online SEO are things you can do yourself online (meaning webmaster). Offline SEO are things you do while not online that may improve your SEO. This is not the focus of this guide. If you are more technical, check out our Hash Tables article to understand what is important with SEO and why text must be the key to how your company is found.
Step 1 – Keyword Research
The first thing you want to focus on is keyword research. This is the MOST IMPORTANT SEO STEP that will make all other steps worthwhile if done correctly. If done incorrectly, all other SEO steps will be futile. Think about the last time you wanted / needed something. You most likely didn’t pull out the yellow pages book to see if someone in your neighborhood could aid you. Of course not, you went to Google, typed in what you were looking for, and viola, search engine results were returned to you. In which case you most likely clicked on an ad, and then suggested to your significant other that you had done research.
In this step, you will also want to plan the structure of your website from an SEO perspective in addition to keyword research. Each page on the site should target one or more SEO keywords/phrases. However, you don’t want to target more than 3 keywords on a page since you will most likely show up on page 10+ or not at all for each keyword with a very low probability of being clicked. The key to keyword research is to find keywords that will bring your company a high value user if your website is chosen to be clicked on Google for that searched keyword or phrase. Utilizing tools such as Keyword Planner from Google can help in determining if a certain keyword or phrase is worth targeting. You don’t want to put too much effort into keywords that very few people are looking for. Also note that some keywords are seasonal and have high search volume when in season and low volume otherwise. Seasonal search keywords are worth targeting in my opinion.
Step 2 – Descriptive Title Tag
Ensure title tags are on every page with a catchy title that tells the Google searcher what your page is about. The title tag is geek speak, but you want the text between <title>This is the SEO Title Information</title> to convince the searcher that this page on your website solves their problem. The title tag shows up in the Google search results so it is good to have keywords in the tag, which will usually help with its ranking (where it is located within the Google Search Results Page).
Step 3 – Description Meta Tag
Add a meta description tag to each page on your website. The description meta tag tells Google and potential users what to expect from visiting your page. The description tag is also geek speak, but you want the text between <meta name=”description” content=”My SEO Description Text” /> to also convince the searcher that this page on your website solves their problem and will hopefully be shown along with the title tag. If however, Google determines there’s a better description with keywords on the actual page, it may use that for your description. To see if your site is indexed and searchable on Google, type in (site: mysite.com) in a Google search bar and if your site exists in Google, you will see how it is displayed. In most cases, it will show your title and meta description tags. This is what a potentially interested user in your products or services will see prior to clicking your website. Hence you can see how important this step is for EVERY PAGE on your website.
Step 4 – Mobile Friendly
Ensure your website is mobile friendly. You can check if your site is mobile friendly by visiting the Mobile Friendly Tester from Google. Google has moved to mobile first as users now use the web on their phone more than they do on desktops. As a result, and with user experience in mind, Google favors websites that are mobile friendly. This more involved task, however, requires a developer / designer that understands mobile design tradeoffs.
Step 5 – Heading Tags
Add heading tags (H1) to each page with keywords sprinkled in them. You’ll want to use active voice as much as possible to get your keywords towards the beginning of H1 tag. The heading tells Google what the page / section is about and allows the text stand out from the rest of the page. You can also add other header tags for sub headings that have similar keywords in them.
Step 6 – Anchor Link Text
Add links to other pages within your website and describe the anchor text with keywords if possible. Do not put words like Click Me! which does not describe anything and cannot be helpful to help Google determine the contents of the page it is linking to. A trick is to do something like, Visit our registration page to learn more. That way the link part is registration page, and has similar effect of click here to learn more but is SEO friendly.
Step 7 – Emphasis of Keywords
Add online seo (bold), search engine optimization (italics), SEO GUIDE (all caps), ONLINE SEO GUIDE (bold and all caps) text to emphasize important keywords on your page. This is how you communicate to Google what words are important to your page, which will help to improve your website’s SEO ranking for those keywords.
Step 8 – Speedy Website
Ensure your website loads quickly. Although this tough development task is necessary, it just stems from trying to please the user. Users do not want to wait more than 5 seconds for a web page to load on their phone. The attention span of most people is disrupted after that time frame, so it makes sense to follow Google guidelines and get your website running quickly. Test out your website with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Step 9 – Image Descriptions
Add alt and title text to your images. In HTML, images are added to the page with the <img> tag. It may look something like this <img src=”images/myimage.jpg” />. If your’s looks like this, you’ll want to try to optimize it for search engines and you’ll want to add some of the keywords chosen in step 1 to your alt descriptions. Focus on the alt descriptions for SEO and the title descriptions for a good user experience in web browsers like Safari. In other words, the alt description is much more important.
This is a better way to add an SEO image (<img src=”images/online-seo.jpg” alt=”Guide To Online SEO Helps in Rankings” title=”Guide To Online SEO Helps in Rankings” />).
This is much more informative to Google or Bing that the keyword “online seo” is being targeted, instead of some image name such as DSC0430.JPG, which absolutely no one will type into Google.
ADVANCED SEO TECHNIQUES
Step 10 – Structured Data
Look for opportunities to add structured data to your page. With voice search becoming more prevalent, it will be important to identify any opportunities for featured snippets and implement them as early as possible. Get in on the action early. You can’t win if you don’t play!
Step 11 – Blogging
Start a blog. Blogging allows you to do work one time, and that work benefit you for the rest of your life. Like entrepreneurs often convey in small talk, they can do work one time and it pay them for the rest of their life. This is that chance! Well let’s get more practical. You need to create search engine friendly content that is keyword focused and beneficial to your audience. People don’t really care what’s happening at your company, but they do care about how to improve their skills and their environment. Great content is also linked to by other websites which helps your website’s link building and your SEO ranking.
Step 12 – Forum, User Engagement
What’s the easiest way to get rich? Other people’s work. Create a forum for discussion with topics focused on keywords. If you are in the technical world, add something like Known Issues, Wiki Knowledge Base, or Bug Tracker and try to focus them on potential keywords.
Step 13 – Email Newsletter
Use your email newsletter to your advantage. Ask prior clients to rate you and get repeat business from them. This may help your SEO since creating buzz can help your SEO through random actions by your audience.
Following these steps will greatly improve your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings for your website. And the great thing about it is once you optimize your website for search, you don’t have to do it over and over to continue reaping the rewards to the optimization. It will however, make sense to revisit after 6 months to see if there are words you show up for in the Google Search Results but are not targeted by your website. If this is the case, you’ll want to add pages to target those words improving your SEO even more. It is definitely worth it to optimize your website as you will no longer be on an island, but will be plugged into the Google ecosystem for life.
Also, remember the acronym RAP (Relevance, Authority, Placement). You build your authority by building your credibility. Relevance refers to being relevant to the keyword search and placement means where on the page the keyword is placed. So words placed near the top of actual content will hold much more weight than those placed in the header or footer or towards the bottom of the page. Lastly, Google relies on EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). You can most likely fill in the blanks but just remember the race you walk and focus on building your website’s credibility.
Finally, let’s reinforce the key to Search Engine Optimization improvement. Write great focused content meant for human readers that uses keywords to reinforce the content! Great content rules on the web and naturally impacts every aspect of SEO, both offline and online.
If you are in need of great SEO services that bring results, please get a quote from us today! We’d love to help.
