In a recent blog post, I talked about SEO vs. PPC, including the pros and cons of each. In the final analysis, I suggested that a comprehensive search engine marketing (SEM) strategy including a synergistic combination of paid and unpaid marketing was the best approach.
Today, I want to zero in a little bit on SEO and talk about the three types of SEO you can use to get your website to rise in the search engine results.
This will still be a fairly high-level look at search engine optimization, as the specific tactics within each of the following categories require a level of detailed description that’s beyond the scope of this post.
Nevertheless, if you’re not a real SEO aficionado, this three-category breakdown might be helpful in pointing you toward some gaps in your SEO strategy that might need tending to.
The three categories we’ll look at today are:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO, and
- Technical SEO
Let’s break it down.
On-Page SEO
The first category of search engine optimization tactics we’ll look at is the one that you’re likely to be most familiar with. At a general level, on-page SEO involves the practice of optimizing both your website’s pages (what the public can see) and their back-end counterparts (the parts of the page that can be accessed via your website’s dashboard, which the public can’t see but which, nevertheless, the search engine spiders CAN see) so your pages rank higher.
There are a number of important tactics in this category that you should attend to regularly on all the pages of your site. Here they are, with a short description of each and its importance:
- Matching Search Intent: This is the most important tactic in this category. “Matching search intent” simply means that your site’s pages are designed to solve the problems of the people who find you. To do this, you have to put yourself in the shoes of your site visitor. Ask yourself, “If this page is designed around keyword X,” what would someone have typed into a search engine to arrive here?” Is the person looking for information (informational search)? Is he looking for a general product or service to help him solve a problem (commercial search)? Is he looking to buy something specific (transactional search)? Figuring out what your site visitor is looking for and making sure that you provide exactly that on your site makes your site relevant to Google, which is factor number one playing into how highly they are going to rank your site. This topic is so important, and there are so many details involved in making your content a good match for search intent that I plan to write another blog post in a few weeks to dig more deeply into it. For now, simply put yourself in your site visitor’s place and ask yourself, “Am I providing on my site the kind of content that is likely to be seen as useful?” If so, great! If not, think about what adjustments need to be made and start implementing those changes right away.
- Covering Topics In Depth: The amount of content out there on the web just continues to increase. But just because there’s a lot of it doesn’t mean it’s any good. In fact, the default standard seems to be short fluff articles that rarely offer anything new, and even the rehashed content is usually cut down to bite-sized pieces. Good content, on the other hand, is meaty. It has substance. If it doesn’t offer a unique take on the topic, it at least offers an in-depth treatment of the subject. And since Google rewards good (useful) content, it also tends to reward longer content.
- Title Tags and Meta-Descriptions: On the backend of your website, you should have installed an SEO plug-in that helps your site’s pages and posts rank better in search. It does this by giving you places to create page titles and meta-descriptions of the content. Use the main keyword(s) you’d like your page to rank for in both the title tag (toward the front if possible) and the meta-description. Google will then rank your page more highly for that term(s).
- Alt-Tags for Images: Similar to title tags and meta-descriptions, alt-tags are backend elements to your pages and posts that need to be optimized. An alt-tag is the descriptive word(s) you use to describe the images you use on your site. The reason for alt-tags is accessibility. Users with screen readers (usually those with visual impairments) will be read the alt-tag so they can get a better sense of the images on a website. Google can read the words assigned to these images, so using your keyword(s) to describe the image(s) helps the page rank better.
- Readability: Google’s algorithm appears to privilege text that’s more easily read. This is likely because people tend to mentally check out when they encounter text that seems daunting, meaning that they abandon the site quickly. And if people leave a site quickly, they won’t have the chance to see any ads that might be on the site (bad for Google). Here are some of the key things to do to make your copy more readable: use simple wording whenever possible, use short paragraphs, use a larger font, and use lots of white space on the page. Generous use of sub-headings and bullet points also helps. Think about the “skimmers” and “scrollers” out there (there’s a lot of them). Make sure they can scan through your text easily and still get the gist of it.
- Keyword Placement Within Your Text: It’s important that you not only focus on using one or two keywords with intentionality when you write your copy, but that you also pay attention to where on the page that keyword(s) shows up. The best places to put your keyword(s) is in the H1 headline, a time or two near the beginning of the page or post, and possibly in a sub-heading. Don’t overdo it and certainly don’t put the keyword in so many places that it sounds awkward (something called “keyword stuffing” that Google will actually penalize you for).
Using the bulleted items above as a checklist whenever you create new content on your website will go a long way toward getting a higher ranking from Google, but this is just one of the three main categories you should attend to.
Off-Page SEO
The second category of SEO is off-page SEO, which is (duh!) those steps you can take outside of your website to improve its ranking.
There are two main sub-categories of tactics with off-page SEO: backlinks and brand mentions.
“Backlinks” refers to links originating on another website and linking back to yours. For example, if another blogger reads a post on your site and likes it so much that they refer to it (and link to it) in a post on their own site. Google privileges websites in their rankings who have lots of good, quality links coming into it because it speaks to the quality and authority of your content.
Brand mentions of your company, your products, or your services on other websites (whether they link to you directly or not) also speak to the quality of your site, and as such, they are given weight in Google’s algorithm.
Here’s a more in-depth breakdown of these off-page SEO factors:
- Backlinks: Quantity: When more links come into your site from other sites, it indicates that lots of people like your content and want their own audiences to see it. The number of links by itself isn’t the sole factor figuring into the calculations, though, as people have found ways in the past to scam the system by sending lot of bogus links to their sites. Which leads us to…
- Backlinks: Quality (Link Authority): The quality of the sites linking to yours is also given weight in the algorithm. The more the linking site is seen as an authority in its field, the more the link matters.
- Backlinks: Guest Blogging: You don’t usually have much control over what backlinks come to your site (we’ll talk in future posts about how you can take at least some control of the process), but one way to gain control is to be a guest blogger on another (preferably an authority) site. If you post some content on another site, they will allow you to add a short guest bio and link to your website at the end.
- Backlinks: Traffic: Google also privileges backlinks that come from sites with lots of traffic. Traffic is one factor Google uses to determine a site’s authority, so a site with more traffic is roughly equal to a site with more authority (quality) linking to your site.
- Brand Mentions: Guest Blogging: As noted above, brand mentions are also figured into Google’s algorithm for ranking sites. There’s evidence that Google gives your site credit for brand mentions even if they aren’t linked to your site, although a link is, of course, better, as it also brings you traffic. One way to make sure you get some brand mentions is to guest blog. This allows you to mention your company, products, and/or services naturally within the content and certainly again in the bio at the end of your post.
- Brand Mentions: Be a Guest on a Podcast: Similar to brand mentions coming from guest blogs, brand mentions in a podcast where you are interviewed are given weight in Google’s ranking system, so it pays to be interviewed whenever possible. Make sure to tell the listeners at the end of the interview where they can find your content!
The above is just a quick run-down of several off-page factors that can boost your SEO. I will dig more into the specific “how to” of this in a future post. For now, think about which of these off-page tactics you’re using and which you aren’t and make a plan to fill in the gaps in the days ahead.
Technical SEO
The third and final category of SEO strategies is technical SEO, which involves making technical changes to help search engines crawl and index your content.
Here are a few of the more important technical factors you can take charge of:
- Improving Page Load Speed: When your pages take a long time to load—perhaps due to to large images or videos—site visitors tend to abandon the site before they’ve even seen your content. Compressing images and making sure videos are in the “off” position (don’t start immediately when someone lands on the page) are just a couple of ways to speed up your page speed. Remember that today’s web browser has little or no patience or tolerance for slow load times.
- Mobile Friendliness: Today, more and more people spend the majority of their internet time on their mobile phones rather than a desktop or laptop computer. If your site looks funky or your content is basically inaccessible on mobile, you’re going to lose tons of traffic. Make sure that your site is set up to be mobile-responsive.
- Identify Crawl Errors with a Crawl Report: You can use a number of tools online to do a quick site audit of many technical SEO features of your site. For example, using UberSuggest, you can enter your URL into a field and run a site audit. In just a few minutes, it will tell you if you have duplicate content, slow page load speeds, missing H1 or H2 headlines, etc. Identifying and fixing such errors will go a long way toward improving your site ranking.
- Secure Site Status: If your site is still an http site instead of a https site, you need to switch to https right away. If you don’t, both search engines and users may get error codes instead of your content when they try to access your site.
These are just some of the technical aspects of your site that could either be helping you rank higher (if you get them right) or dragging your ranking down (if you get them wrong). If all this technical stuff just sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you, it might be worth having a web expert do a site audit of both your content and the technical aspects of your site. It will cost you a little money, but it would probably be well worth it in improved site rank.
Conclusion
If you know just enough about SEO to get yourself confused or in trouble, it’s time you educated yourself about some of the more important SEO strategies and tactics. You don’t have to become an expert—you probably have better uses of your time—but you do need to learn enough about it to talk to someone who IS an SEO expert and describe to them what you’d like to do with your site.
The three-part categorization I’ve gone over today will hopefully be helpful in directing you to some of the factors about your site that might need attention.
Please take a few moments and comment on this post or ask your questions. I’d be happy to talk about it with you.
And if you’d like me to do an in-depth site audit on your website to identify strengths as well as areas of concern, just give me a shout-out on my Contact page.
