Anyone with a business website is familiar with the term SEO, or search engine optimization. But simply knowing what it means, even having a basic understanding of terms like keyword or backlink, isn’t going to do much to help your site get noticed by the search engines.
Using strategies that worked as recently as two years ago won’t help much; in fact, they may do more harm than good for a site’s standing in the results page.
“SEO is, in many ways, both an art and a science — the playing field changes from time to time, with different web development practices and new search engine algorithms, and entrepreneurs and SEO experts alike must be agile and flexible to roll with the punches,” says Charlie Gaudet of Predictable Profits.
Winds of change
Since 2011 Google’s search algorithm has undergone some major updates that include Panda, Panda 2.0, Penguin, Multi-Week Update, and Hummingbird, which was just announced September 27. Each of these algorithm changes greatly altered how the world’s biggest search engine assesses the relevance of millions of websites.
These changes certainly aren’t the last that will be rolled out by Google. But every time the algorithm is updated, that doesn’t mean everything you’ve done for your site is lost. Actually, a good foundation will only require a little flexibility with the science of SEO and small tweaks to adjust to any change, rather than a large overhaul.
A good foundation in SEO
Matt Cutts of Google has stated numerous times that giving users a quality experience is the most important thing, when it comes to giving a page a high rank. “Succeeding in SEO will be the same as it’s always been if you’re doing it right — give the users a great experience. Think about what your audiences want and build a site for them. “
That experience starts with a website that works. Many businesses have turned to quick and easy web development suites that allow them to build large and powerful sites without having to know how to code. This can be beneficial in getting a site off the ground, but it can also have some serious drawbacks.
Sites need to incorporate technical SEO before any other work is done. This includes making sure the site is crawlable by the search engine spiders. It also needs to load quickly enough that visitors don’t leave the site in disgust because they had to wait too long.
The way URLs are created also plays an important role in how well a site gets optimized. One way to measure how well your site is optimized for the user’s experience is to check the bounce rate statistics on Google Analytics. A higher bounce rate could mean that users are having trouble with your site.
The next pillar of SEO is the content that visitors come to read and view. More isn’t always better. According to Rand Fishkin of Moz.com, “My experience has been that a lot of small businesses and professionals are overinvesting in quantity of content and under investing in quality.”
Content can’t just be there, it has to do something: visitors have to find it valuable. When people see the value in your content, they are more apt to share it and recommend it to others. This leads to the third aspect of this foundation: social media.
Any business website nowadays needs to be complemented by a strong social media presence. It’s simply not enough to write a great article that revolutionizes your industry if people have a hard time engaging with you about it.
Social media provides that platform, but is also gives your customers a way to talk about your products and services, which helps to build your brand and reputation. This, along with the links to your content from social shares, will help strengthen your SEO efforts in a way that won’t suffer the next time Google is updated.
Originally posted on November 7, 2013 @ 9:36 am