This blog post is part of “The Ultimate Guide to SEO” blog series.
Having a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is an important cornerstone of lead generation through your website.
Recent changes in Google’s search engine algorithm are already having an impact. In fact, Google’s own blogger.com website has seen a 20% drop in search traffic.
How to reduce the impact of search engines algorithm changes
Understand what drives Google. Google is the king of search, accounting for 65% of all search traffic. What Google wants most is to present to its users specifically what they are looking for. When you search, you want a current response to your question, and a highly relevant response to your question. That’s exactly what Google wants to give you.
“Current” and “relevant”. Keep these words in mind. Blog frequently, as this connotes “current” in Googles eyes.
Focus your content marketing effort on the basic SEO elements to achieve “relevance”. These key elements of SEO are less likely to be affected by future search engine changes.
Here are 16 tips to help you focus on the important elements of an effective SEO strategy.
- Pick the right domain name. Choose a domain name that says something about your business and your site’s content.
- Choose a meaningful title and description statement for your website/blog. These form part of the meta-data for your site or blog.
- Start with a benchmark. Know what your current mozRank is and continue to monitor it.
- You blog’s theme or template can help (or hurt) your SEO, so be sure to choose this carefully. Make sure you can reach every page within three clicks, too.
- Check your blog’s referrer log or your web analytics regularly to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms they are using to find your site.
- Use long tail keywords relevant to your topic. Use these in your title tag, page header, article title and at least once near the top and near the bottom of your post. Long tail keywords in URLs also make them easier for your visitors and for the search engines.
- Build internal links to other articles when creating new content. This makes it easy for readers and search engines to find other pages of interest.
- Provide remarkable (as in people would remark on it) content. High-quality, relevant content is part of what Google is looking for.
- Your content should be fresh. Add new content at least twice a week, and daily is better. The latest Google search engine update ranks new content higher in the search results.
- Improve your site’s visibility in Google using their free Add URLL tool.
- Be sure your site has an XML sitemap, and submit this to Google using Google’s Webmater Tools.
- Be sure to include alt text descriptions for all photos, image, and videos. Search engines can “read” images — they only see text. So give them some text with keywords for each of your images.
- Use blog post tags. Tags are one or two-word labels for your content. For example, this post is tagged “seo”. Some search engines use tags to index and find your posts faster.
- Ramp up your social media marketing as part of your SEO strategy. More and more social media content is being shown in search results.
- Use Google Page Speed Insights to test your site for loading speed on desktops and mobile. Page speed is an increasing factor in search rankings.
- Make sure your site is mobile friendly–mobile search surpassed desktop search in 2015, and search engines penalize mobile-unfriendly sites.
You can also check our premium B2B SEO services to accelerate your traffic, leads, and sales.
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