My guess is, your purpose for putting up a website most likely revolves around creating leads to your business or self-promotion, or perhaps both?. Whatever the case, the primary goal is to get people to visit your site and to keep them there. As a website owner, you probably already know SEO is ever changing, with Google’s habit of releasing updates every now and then which can really affect the search ranking of your site. Despite Google’s changes and SEO’s continuous evolution, the practice continues to subsist in 2013. Since SEO looks like it’s here for the long haul, here are some of the best SEO tips to stay on track this year:
Don’t Panic! Just Stay Focused
If you look in Google Analytics and notice your rankings have suddenly dropped,, don’t panic (well okay, you might panic a little bit, but at least remember to keep breathing!). Refrain from going into a frenzy of jumping to conclusions before you find out the real reason why it happened.
So, the number one tip is to figure out what the real problem is and focus on getting it resolved.
Authority: Your Site’s Trump Card
Way back when you first launched your site, you might have used quite a number of links to prove yourself as the definitive source for that keyword. Once your site’s authority naturally increases through high quality backlinks, the game starts to change. Why? Because Google starts believing you have a winning website, that deserves a high page rank, since so many of your peers link to you. The takeaway from this: naturally build worthy backlinks to your site to establish yourself as an industry authority. Now that your peers are linking to you, what does Google think about your user’s experience?
Review Your User’s Experience
Do you know the movements of your visitors? If not, you should! By using Google Analytics, have a look at the metrics for your user’s experience. How long are visitors staying on your site? How fast does it load? How do they flow through it? Is there anything you can do to improve it? Checking and tweaking the design, layout and overall performance can add to your website’s ability to engage your target audience. “Good hint” I hear you say, but wait, there’s more where that came from!
Clean House! Review Internal Links & Inbound Link Profile
If you didn’t already know, your internal links can add (or subtract) value to your site in the eyes of Google. If you’ve “over optimized” (meaning you’ve re-used the same word or phrase a heap of times on one page) your anchor text or have internal links with no value for the user – clean them up & throw ‘em out! Once you’ve done that, check Google Webmaster Tools for the list of places linking back to your site. If there are links pointing to your site that aren’t natural, get those dodgy ones removed. If the links are from sites you have no control over, send removal requests to the site owners. The overall goal here is to clean your internal & inbound link profile.
Is Your Canonicalisation In place?
Do you even know what that is? Canonicalisation is the fancy term for viewing exactly the same content two or more ways. For example, when you have http://www.sitename.com as the homepage, it can also be viewed without the famous “www” (http://sitename.com) or with the added “index.html” tail (http://sitename.com/index.html).
Canonicalisation can become a problem when a search engine isn’t clever enough to figure out that the pages are one and the same.. Because it’s confused, the search engine then passes authority separately instead of routing the link juice to the same place (of which would definitely help your site’s ranking).
Also, when redirecting pages to the same place, you end up establishing a bulk of the authority to that page. Make sure to remove additional copies of the same page if you have any, since one highly authoritative page is much better than two or three slightly recognised copycats. Alrighty, you’ve ticked all the boxes so far on this list, what else can you do?
Set Up Trust Factors
By establishing your content’s authorship, displaying contact details and privacy policy, it lets people know you’re a real person with a real business. If your visitors feel like you’re “there” for them and contactable, an inherent trust begins to develop. And that’s just the start, you can even record a web video introducing yourself and post that to your page, opening the door even further for your visitors to “come in”. But, with all this stuff I’ve just outlined for you, how do you know you’re staying within Google’s boundaries?
Know The Rules! Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Knowing where you stand with Google is actually pretty easy. Just go over to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, review and check if you’re doing anything that violates the rules. If you see you’ve done something wrong, such as over-optimizing keywords or using low quality backlinks, get on it fast and deal with the problem properly. But, you’re a busy business owner, you don’t have time for all this SEO stuff…what should you do?
Leave It To The Experts
With so many resources available online, and this blog being just one of them, you can always try and take on another task and work your way back into Google’s good graces in your spare time. Just be on the look out for the best SEO tips from reliable sources.
But if you (like most business owners out there) are already strapped for time and can’t fathom taking on “To Do” item, then put your SEO issues in the hands of the experts at Melbourne SEO Services – so you can get back to doing what you do best (working on your business!). Feel free to contact us today or take a look at our services on this page.