09 Apr Best Practice for Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimization is extremely important if you have a website, that’s regardless if your website is eCommerce or not.
However, it is not the same as it was 10 years ago so you can’t use the same practices you may have used back then.
Search has changed dramatically just in the last couple of years, and has become much more focused on quality over quantity which is a stark contrast to what is was “back in the day”.
If you manage your SEO yourself or if you’re working with a company that manages your search engine optimisation for you, ensure you always follow best practice.
Thousands of links are no longer needed and could indeed be detrimental to the success of your search rankings if they weren’t from well ranked and reputable websites. Unfortunately, there are still many SEO companies that still follow bad practices for the simple reason to make money instead of providing a respectable and effective service.
You need to ensure your links are diverse and your content doesn’t just include a lot of the same words or sentences with links, because the search engines (mainly Google) see this as spam like activity and unnatural. It is important to keep your anchor text varied. Variations on keywords will always be the best action you can take when carrying out content optimization.
Good optimisation as of 2012 features good quality content which your audience will gain enjoyment in reading and ideally learn something too. Ensure you have some relevant words to the message which stand out and link 2 or 3 up to relevant content within your site and you will see a natural improvement in your rankings over a period of time.
Try not to over match your article titles or page title with your domain name or other content within a page.
Overkill with any keyword, link or title will just cause your website to rank poorly.
Social media is not just a flash in the pan which you can afford to ignore. Social media has a big impact on your search rankings which is just one of the reason’s all businesses should be utilising this network for optimization purposes. When you share an update on whichever social media platform you’re using, try to ensure you’re linking it to an internal page or blog article because this will really help when the search engines employ their social signal bots.
A big misconception for a lot of businesses with social media accounts is that in order for it to be effective or for the account to look impressive they have to have thousands of followers and be sending out thousands of tweets a week. The emphasis must always be on quality and those bad practices do not show your audience or the search engines that in the slightest.
If you have 20000 followers but 19632 are inactive or ‘dummy’ accounts not only are you sharing your updates with social ghosts but you’re discrediting your brand because when someone looks at your account and see’s your followers aren’t genuine that automatically gives them a poor impression of your brand.
Social is really going to play a key part in the future of SEO because search engines are going to be paying more attention to social profiles and the link between these networks and websites.
Organic growth is the best way to focus your optimisation efforts, it may take longer but will be worth the wait in the long run.
If you stick to these best practice rules when carrying out the optimisation for your site you will no doubt improve your rankings as well as your brand’s online reputation.