Guest Blog By: Michael Wynn, Creative Director, InkPlot | @InkPlotYYC
Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.
Google rolls out hundreds of updates each year and will always be evolving. If you adhere to some of the following basic rules of SEO, you will ensure that your site gets off to a good start.
- Content is king. More than anything, you need to ensure you have a solid foundation of content that your users will be interested in, and that there is enough content to fill each page and work some of your keywords into. Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed below. Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content.
- Create unique, accurate page titles. A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results.It’s also worth avoiding extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users or stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags in hopes of improving your ranking. Google will just truncate your title in those cases.
- Make sure each page has a unique “description” meta tag. A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about and Google might use them as snippets for your pages in the search results.
- Ensure you have a simple, easy to understand URL structure. Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and search engines with more information about the page than a more cryptic numerical one will offer. And because URLs are displayed in search results, it’s worth spending some time to get them right.
- Put an HTML site map page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file. A simple site map page with links to all of the pages or the most important pages on your site can be useful. Creating an XML Sitemap file for your site helps ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site.
- Optimize the images on your site for both speed and SEO. It’s important to ensure that the images on your site are not bogging down your load times, and to also ensure that they can be found and indexed properly. Optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Image Search to better understand your images.
- Make sure you have a robots.txt file for Google. A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named “robots.txt”, is placed in the root directory of your site.
- Master making announcements via blogs and being recognized online. This is part of creating a good backlink strategy for your site. Google gets that you’d like to let others know about the hard work you’ve put into your content. Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject.
- Make sure you’re using Google Analytics and Webmaster tools. These two free services should be put in place and utilized the day your new site launches. They allow you to see exactly what’s going on with your website and where you may need improvement. From displaying which keywords are working and where you’re getting your inbox traffic from, to identifying broken links and bottlenecks on your site, it’s worth spending some serious time getting to know these powerful tools.
- Increase ongoing improvements and content population. Your website is never complete. In order to maintain positioning or improve it, you need to be prepared for an ongoing cycle of evaluation, updates and monitoring in order to really affect your overall SEO. Also providing fresh, keyword focused content ensures that you’re always giving Google a reason to come back and crawl through your website. Whether that’s accomplished through new blog posts, page content or integrating your social media tools into the site, all can greatly benefit your overall growth and online clout.
Michael Wynn, owner and partner at Full Blast Creative/InkPlot, focuses on Interactive / Social / Strategy. Michael also founded WingsnBeer.com, the most comprehensive online chicken wing resource. His creative and talented crew develop an endless array of web and print projects, social media campaigns, with sage advice and fresh thinking.