An overview of the SEO optimization process
April 24, 2014: If your website is not showing up in major search engines’ organic search results, there are steps you can take to improve your visibility. Collectively, these steps are known as search engine optimization (SEO). The optimization process must begin with a thorough understanding of how search engines rank web pages.
What follows is a basic outline of the SEO process.
Step 1. Identify and Fix SEO Roadblocks
Here are three common SEO roadblocks the Didit team frequently encounters:
Canonical URL problems – This happens when there is no permanent redirect from the non-www version of your domain to the www version (or vice versa). We are constantly amazed by the number of sites that still have this issue. The effect of this missing redirection is that Google treats each of these domains as a separate website; consequently links that go to one version of the domain are not credited to the other. This causes a split in PageRank, as well as duplicate content issues because there are, in effect, two home pages.
Duplicate Content issues – Whenever there are two pages with substantially similar content, Google ignores one of them. (How substantially similar they have to be to qualify as duplicate content is a subject of great debate.) One way you might inadvertently create duplicate content is by having a home page at both www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/default.html. In this case, you should create a permanent redirect from one to the other.
Indexing issues – These occur when the search engine crawlers can’t find their way to some of your pages. This can happen when you use JavaScript or Flash as the only navigation or when you have a registration page that collects user information before permitting them to view content. To work around issues like these, it helps to have a good sitemap linked from the home page. The use of Frames is strongly discouraged from an SEO standpoint, because it makes it nearly impossible for the search engines to associate content in a Frame with the page it is on.
Step 2. Develop a Keyword Strategy
Keyword Traffic and Competition – Understanding your keyword space is vital to a sound SEO strategy. This entails developing a list of relevant keywords and then researching these keywords to determine their traffic and level of competition. Traffic estimates are available from the Google AdWords keyword traffic estimator tool. Competition is a little harder to measure, but there are free tools that can help such as the SEO Chat Keyword Difficulty Check Tool.
Assigning Keywords to Pages – To optimize your pages, you need to ensure that each page has a keyword focus. Choosing the best keywords for each page involves matching the content of the page to two to three keyword phrases. When there is no appropriate content for important keywords, then you need to create new pages around those keyword themes.
Step 3. Optimize Information Architecture
Now that you have a keyword strategy, you can optimize your information architecture. To do this, create your sitemap and name pages using your chosen keywords, both in the URL of those pages (i.e. their filenames) and in the site navigation that links to those pages. Arrange your page hierarchy so that the more important and/or competitive pages are linked directly from the home page. If you link too many pages from the home page, it will dilute the PageRank passed to any one page from your home page. As a general rule of thumb, if you have more than 50 links from your home page (100 links for larger sites), you may want to consider making your information architecture more hierarchical.
Step 4. Optimize Individual Pages
With your keyword strategy and information architecture in place, it’s now time to optimize your individual pages for relevancy. You can do this by optimizing each of the so-called “on-page” factors on each page. These factors include the title tag, heading tags, body copy, link text (also called anchor text) and even the alt attribute of images on the page. Make sure that you use each of your keywords at least once in each of these areas. However, be careful not to go overboard as this will look “spammy” to the search engines. Try to make your copy flow naturally. You should also create a unique meta description tag for each page. Although it is not considered for relevancy purposes, this will make it far more likely that Google will use your meta description to form the “snippet,” (i.e., the text that appears below the title in the search results).
Step 5. Set up Reporting
Before you launch your newly optimized pages, you should establish a baseline for both search positions and the traffic and conversions they generate for you. You can use automated tools such as Advance Web Ranking for search position reporting and Google Analytics for website traffic analysis. Once you have a baseline for search positions and traffic, you are ready to make your optimized pages live. It’s a good idea to run your search position reporting tools at a chosen interval so you can see the impact your optimizations have on your search positions, traffic and conversions.
Step 6. Link Building
Now that you’ve optimized your website for relevancy, it’s time to focus on improving the importance (or authority) of your website. This is accomplished through link building. Google considers a link to your website from another site to be an implied endorsement of your site Google’s PageRank algorithm is based on this concept. Because link building is tied to how Google ranks web pages, it is crucial to search engine optimization and is one of the more difficult SEO components.
It is vital that your link-building efforts be natural, e.g. that links be acquired without any compensation-based quid pro quo. The search engines are increasingly taking steps against link networks that trade links. Links must be earned creating great, link-worthy content that people feel strongly enough about to link to without being paid or being offered any kind of compensation.
Finding Potential Link Sources – You can find links from many different types of websites, such as:
• Online directories like the Open Directory Project and the Yahoo Directory.
• Press releases which get published by online news sites like PRWeb.com and PRnewswire.com.
• Article publishers like ezinearticles.com and squidoo.com (these sites will publish your contributed articles).
• Blogs that allow you to provide followed links in the comments you post.
• Web sites of your current business partners, e.g., accountants, investors, lawyers, etc.
Creating Link Bait – This is a linking technique with high potential for gaining natural links by convincing other website owners to link to your site. To do this, you need to have an informative, useful, engaging or humorous piece of content. Link bait content should be well-written as the goal is to get others to link from their sites to your article. To generate a buzz that will reverberate through blogs and social media channels and encourage people to link from their sites to your article, you need high quality content.
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