Times
have changed. Dramatically. Gone are the days of relying on the Yellow Pages to
help customers find you. Today, creating a web presence is crucial to
businesses large and small and is easily one of the most important things you
can do for your brand.
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| SEO Factors
Of
course, just building a website isn’t enough. Sure, in a perfect world the
“build it and they will come” mindset would work, but the truth is, there are
many other factors that need to be considered. This is where search engine
optimization (SEO) comes into play and can act to increase visibility of your
website and your brand online.
Optimizing your site so the search engines can properly crawl and index
it is extremely important to your organic visibility. When done properly the
visibility will lead to conversions, which is the goal for most businesses.
But
SEO isn’t as easy as it may seem, and the factors that are important are
constantly changing as the search engine algorithms evolve to become more
complex. You need to keep on top of the changes and evolve as the search
engines become smarter.
What
are the factors you should be aware of in 2014? I’ve outlined them below.
It’s
worth noting this is not a definitive list, but it’s a good start place for
marketers looking to increase their web presence and rankings.
Content
Content
has always been one of the more important factors when it comes to SEO and
rankings. It is extremely important to have unique, high quality content on all
pages of your website. When writing the content for your site, consider the
keywords you want the site to rank for. You want to use the terms naturally
within your copy, so they are present but not so you’re overdoing it or making
the content read unnaturally. It is also important to include related keywords
in your content, which is what makes keyword research so important before
starting to write any content. The Google keyword planner is perfect for
finding the best related keywords to get into your copy.
Usability
Usability
is something that should always be taken into account when creating a new
website. It is proven that a site that is hard to navigate will have an
extremely high bounce rate. We also know that most internet users don’t want to
be forced to think. This is why it’s important to build sites that are easy to
navigate and intuitive to users’ needs. You want to use a navigational
structure that is prominent, well-organized and links to the important areas of
your website. Your site must be designed well, uncluttered and use the right
colors and typography to attract your visitor. If a visitor has to spend ten
minutes trying to find something on your site, well, they won’t. And then
you’ll lose those visitors and potential customers.
This
is why it is important to have people from different demographics try to find
their way around your site while you’re still in the process of building it. I
have a good friend who does a lot of design work, and one of the things he does
with every site he creates is to let his grandfather check it out. His
grandfather is, as you might imagine, a very basic internet user. If his
grandfather has a hard time finding things, he knows something needs to be
changed. Design your navigation to be as simple as possible to help users find
what they’re looking for. A site with bad usability issues can also appear to
be a low quality site, so this is another thing that needs to be considered
when designing a new site. Here is a checklist that can assist with web
usability when designing a new site or during a redesign.
Backlinks
Of
course we have to include backlinks again even though we mentioned them in the
beginning of the post. They have always been important and they always will be,
but getting people to link to your site is not always the easiest thing to do.
This is another area where having unique, quality content is extremely
important. Without good content on your site, there is nothing for people to
link to. A big part of your SEO and content strategy will be deciding what
types of content will benefit your audience and cause them to want to link to
it. Often, this means creating content that is informative, resourceful or
which addresses a common need or pain point.
It
is also important to share your content on your social media profiles. This
helps to ensure people are seeing it and may even share it again to get in
front of even more eyes. Getting your content in front of the right people is
key when you want people to link to you.
It
is also important to share your content on your social media profiles. This
helps to ensure people are seeing it and may even share it again to get in
front of even more eyes. Getting your content in front of the right people is
key when you want people to link to you.
Another
type of content people love to share and link to is rich media content such as
videos, animation and images. High quality videos may take more time and money
to produce but the results you can achieve by investing in them is well worth
it. You should always consider how your content and your site can benefit
others.
Social signals
We
all know how popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+
are, but many businesses still aren’t taking advantage of the value social
media can offer their brand. Participating in these platforms and updating them
on a consistent basis with quality content, gives your brand a push toward
greater visibility. It has been said over recent years that Google looks at
social signals as part of its ranking algorithms, but even if they didn’t
factor into rankings, they still work to add trust and authority to your site.
A good ratio for updating these social profiles is the 80/20 rule, this means
In
addition to the Big 3 social networks, there are hundreds of other sites that
are good to at least grab your brand name on, even if you do not plan on using
them actively. Knowem is a great tool to help you find these sites and see
where your brand name has been claimed.
The
most important social media platform when it comes to SEO is naturally Google+,
some people may dispute this, but when it comes down to it Google is going to
put more weight on their own social network.
Authorship
Google
Authorship and Author Rank have been a hot topic over the last year, and for
good reason. It is a good way to build the authority and trust for your site
and brand. It also gives your search results some additional information (rich
snippets, see below) which is proven to increase click through rates in the
search results. You can have one author on your site or multiple authors. The
most important thing is to have your authors write content that is relevant and
informative.
To
set authorship up correctly you need to create a Google+ profile and add markup
to your blog to link to the author profile. These two things are essential to
establish the link between the blog and the author. Over the years there have
been many people online that have been using fake names to write, but now it is
more important to use real names to be able to get the benefits that authorship
can provide. Google authorship is definitely a must in 2014 and it will help
give your brand a little extra boost and will also give the author a nice
personal brand boost at the same time. Here is a handy guide to getting
authorship set up on your blog so you can get that added boost.
Local listings and citations
Local
SEO has been an important factor for quite a while, but many businesses just
think it will happen naturally. Some aspects of it are natural but there are
also many things that can be done to help boost your site in local organic
search. One of the most important things to do is to get your site listed in
Google Places and Bing places. The registration process is simple and once
complete just requires that you verify your listing. Verification can be done
in a few ways, but most people prefer to do it over the phone or via snail
mail.
Another
area important to local search rankings is getting citations from other sites
that list local businesses with contact info and other details. There are
literally hundreds of places to get citations from and the trickiest part is
finding the good ones that will help. There are some great tools to help you
find places to get citations. Whitespark Local Citation Finder is one of the
more popular tools out there.
Schema
Markup
Schema
markup is additional code that you can put on your website to tell the search
engines exactly what is on your page to help them with indexing. The more you
can tell them about your business or your products the better, and there are
some advantages that come with it. Schema markup allows you to have different
types of rich snippets show in search and there are different types of markup
for all different things. One example that you have probably seen is rich
snippets for video, which allows a video on your website to be seen right in
the search engine results (see example below). Rich snippets have been proven
to increase click through rates by approximately 30 percent, so adding schema markup
to all areas of your site that are applicable will help you to stand out from
the other search results. The folks at Raven Tools have created a great Schema
guide to help you get started with schema markup on your site.
SEO
isn’t a sprint. It’s a process. There are so many factors involved in how you
rank in the search engines marketers must be constantly educating themselves.
Read
Original Content here - http://overit.com/blog/important-seo-factors-for-2014
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