Avoid SEO Mistakes With These 5 Steps
SEO when done correctly can be an exceptionally power full way to get your site ranking organically on the various search engines. Often people try to fast track SEO only for this to have a negative impact on a sites ranking. Here are 5 Steps that will improve your SEO efforts with out running the risk of wasting time and energy with poor SEO tactics.
1. Optimise website Information Architecture
The structure or architecture of your website is vital for getting higher ranking with search engines. Your sites data and content needs to be organised and structured in order to positively affect your design. Here are a few key points:
- Usability – Always remember that your sites content needs to be structured in away that it is friendly to the user.
- Rankings – Your site needs to have a structure that will appeal to the search engines in order for it to be able to rank.
- Conversions – Ensure the content of your site follows your conversion process and that the user is taken through the process smoothly in order to get them to reach your final conversion step.
When creating the site structure for SEO, keep in mind the impact on keyword rankings, but also on usability and conversions
2. Remove duplicated content
Duplicated content is content that appears on the internet in more than one place. If you have content that is appearing on more that 1 website, then that is duplicate content.
Why does duplicate content matter?
For Search Engines
- They dont know which versions to include or exclude from their indices.
- They dont know whether to direct link metrics to one page or to separate it between multiple versions.
- They dont know which version to rank.
For Site Owners
- Search engines will rarely show duplicate content and are then forced to choose which site is more relevant resulting in a possible drop of traffic to your site.
- Link equity can be further diluted as a result of duplicate content. instead of all inbound links pointing to one piece of content, they link to multiple pieces spreading and diluting the link equity.
The result is that the piece of content doesn’t get the search viability that it should.
3. Update Google My Business
If you going for a high rank on Google then make sure you have a Google my business listing and make sure its up to date. Google loves Google and google products and searches for them first so make sure that you get your information right. All content should be up-to-date and accessible. Google My Business allows you to read and respond to reviews and to post photos. Get into a habit of regularly checking how your business looks in search engine results, and keep updating the information.
4. Get your keyword research right
Generic and popular keywords have become difficult to “own” online so make sure you do your homework when it comes to keyword research. You can build a great keyword strategy that will give you a flood of traffic to your site by spending time on your research. Look for keywords around the standard words that automatically come to mind when you think of your business. There are various options you can use when planning our keywords. Exact match, broad match, phrase match etc. Remember to also make use of negative keywords.
5. Use best-practice linking strategy
Your linking strategy is another important SEO that when done correctly can have a positive effect but if done correctly can be a disaster. your internal links are important when establishing your site architecture and spreading link equity.
On a web page, search engines need to see content in order to list keywords in their massive indices. The content also needs to be in a format that allows the spiders to be able to crawl the site and find all the pages of the site. ensure that all our internal links on your site enable users as well the spiders to flow through the various pages on the site with ease.
Final thoughts
SEO, when done correctly, has a huge effect on your sites search ability and ranking with the search engines. It can be very time consuming and one can often tend to take short cuts. There are unfortunately no short cuts to quality SEO. Spend the time getting it right to avoid the search engines penalising your site.
