Take these steps and you’ll be on you way to better search engine visibility
July 9, 2016: If your website isn’t showing up in the search engines results pages, you have an SEO problem. Fortunately, there are immediate actions you can take to improve your situation. Some of these steps are easy; others are technical enough to require the services of a professional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making your web site more search engine-friendly. Its purpose is to give you a high-level overview of the optimization process and — equally important — a list of things you can do today to improve your rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages):
1. Identify and Fix SEO Roadblocks
Search engines use small programs called Robots (AKA “web crawlers”) to gather information about your site. The gathered data is sent back to the search engine and added to the engine’s Index. Make sure that your site isn’t inadvertently blocking these robots from doing their job through use of Frames, Flash, or through Javascript-dependent navigation. Google’s Search Console tool (formerly Webmaster Tools) is an excellent, fully interactive place to examine whether you’re “blocking the bot.”
Another thing that can thwart search engine robots is what’s called a “Canonical URL problem.” For example, if your site URL is “mysite.com,” make sure there is a redirect to “www.mysite.com.” Otherwise the search engines might think that you’ve built two different sites. Here’s a Google Support document that will provide detailed advice about solving any such problems:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Another roadblock you must avoid is having duplicate content on your site (or sites). When Google or the other engines encounter two pages whose content is very similar, they will ignore one page in favor of the other. While there is no explicit search engine penalty for hosting duplicate content, it’s always a good practice to ensure that one — and only one — instance of a particular item of content is on your site.
Broken links and insecure sites are also flags to the search engines that you might not be worth listing. Get your house in order. Make sure your site is patched against malware, that your 404 errors are being handled, and that your outbound links aren’t dead. Google Search Console will be your best friend in this stage of the SEO process.
Site performance — especially on mobile devices — is also becoming a key ranking factor with Google and the other engines. Resolving server performance issues can be tough — whether it’s dealing with your own hosting provider or your internal IT team.
2. Develop a strong keyword strategy
Determining which keywords you want to rank for is a vital step in the search engine optimization process. Keyword Research Tools are your magic lenses into discovering actual — and potential query streams you can potentially monetize. These tools will help you determine keyword volume, price, and stimulate discussion of related keyword phrases you might not have anticipated being associated with your business’ goods or services.
Google Keyword Planner is the first place to stop to determine volume — and value — of your keywords. Popular alternative keyword tools include SEMRush, WordTracker, BuzzSumo, and tools available at Moz.com.
We advise using a range of tools to get the most precise picture of how people are searching for what you do.
Once you’ve identified the queries for which your site is relevant, map them to your site content. For example, early stage (high funnel) keywords should generally map to your root directory content, mid-funnel keywords to your products/service pages, and low-funnel keywords to your product pages.
3. Set up Google Analytics
To measure the success of your efforts, it’s essential that you have analytics software installed on your site’s page. There are many site analytics programs that can help you do this; Google Analytics is a great choice for many businesses because it’s easy to set up, free, and very robust. Even before you’ve taken any steps to optimize your site, get analytics code on your pages to establish a pre-optimization baseline. Get comfortable pasting in tracking pixels (which is easy in most CMS systems, including WordPress).
Here’s a link to a helpful Google page that will walk you through the process of getting Google Analytics installed on your site(s).
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en
4. Optimize Your Pages
The HTML pages on your site may look fine in a browser, but you’ll have to peek into their actual code to see whether they’re going to perform well. HTML code elements that search engines pay attention to include Title tags, Heading tags, Body Copy, Link Text, and Alt tag attributes. If you’re using WordPress to publish your content, there are many good SEO plug-ins that can make this optimization process very easy (we recommend the Yoast SEO plug-in).
Google is increasingly using synonyms and contextual signals to determine what a page is about. Ultimately, Google will decide what audience segment(s) your content is relevant to, but your voice will be heard if you use Schema to classify your content in advance.
If you’ve been lagging on applying Schema formatting to your content, fear not: it’s less difficult than it might seem, especially for WordPress users, who have many capable plugins available for that platform that can make the task easy.
One excellent Schema tool for WordPress-based publishers is the All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin. Once installed, the plugin adds a set of drop-down markup options to your WordPress posts, allowing you to easily classify them among a group of entities (Item Review, Event, People, Product, Recipe, Software Application, Video, or Service), describe them, and associate an image with them (this image can be different from that featured on the post itself).
5. Get Relevant Inbound Links
Without doubt, this, of all the SEO tasks, is the hardest, most-labor intensive one to execute.
It is essential that your link-building efforts be natural, e.g. that links be acquired without any compensation-based quid pro quo. Your pages must earn any links they gain by being interesting, relevant, well-written, timely, and authoritative.
Search engines use the number and quality of links to your site to determine its likelihood of being “authoritative. In the early days of SEO, such authority could be easily gamed, but the search engines have been able to isolate the unique signatures of “link schemes” and other attempts to game the system.
The search engines are increasingly taking steps against link networks that trade links.Penguin and Panda are the most famous, intelligent, and punitive algorithmic incarnations of Google’s anti-spam efforts. You must not run afoul of them. Google also employs many human reviewers across the globe to make the final call about whether a given piece of content is worth the links pointing to it.
To avoid search engine penalties, make good content, don’t push the envelope with page design (especially with interstitials, which Google doesn’t like), and eventually your pages will start to be linked to. You can accelerate this process by buying some clicks, or paying for a press release from a reputable online PR release distributor, but don’t expect any direct “Pagerank Juice” to accrue to your site directly. Links — if they come — will come organically from people who liked what they saw and believe it’s worth mentioning. In this sense, modern linking building is quite akin to traditional PR practices.
Have a question about SEO? Feel free to contact us or tweet us @DiditMarketing.
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