Website Find-ability is called many things. SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing… but they all have the same end in mind. High placement within organic search engine results and some traffic generated from social networks. Good website visibility and an active social network generally leads to an increase of leads and sales.
I’ve highlighted a few of the more time proven SEO methods below. All these tips fall within the “Organic SEO” category.
As you may well know, SEO theory has a tendency to change very rapidly. The reason for this is simple. As the information companies vie for our attention, they try to deliver better results to us, their consumers. They’re constantly adjusting their information retrieval processes and this directly effects SEO.
Try playing baseball on a field where the first and third base lines are constantly moving and the pitchers mound randomly pops up somewhere in the infield as the pitcher is in his windup. Ok, that may be a bit dramatic but it was fun to type.
Anyway, Search engine optimization or SEO entails increasing the number of people who visit your web from search engines. This is done using a mixture of original content, standards compliant code, web 2.0 interactivity, and social networking optimization.
When a website returns on the first page of searches for it’s keyword phrases it gets more new visitors from search engines. Returning on page one for a specific word or phrase can increase traffic by thousands of visitors per month. Here is a little on Google & SEO.
SEO Tutorial Tips
HTML Markup Validation and error fixing. This is important since if your code is error free it will load faster on any browser, whether it’s chrome, ie, or firefox. Page load times are important. If your website’s too slow it will lose traffic and falter on search returns. The w3 Validator will return some very valuable information about missing tags and such. You should use it. If you’re using WordPress and a modern theme you’re probably good.
Accessibility Validation is important for many reasons but that your website can be experienced by users with different sensory abilities is the most fundamental. How would you like to hear an incoherent jumble website after website? Remember, not everyone has 20/20 vision or perfect hearing. Take a couple free classes at section508.gov.
Target Market Research is important for SEO & social networking, enabling one to judge which network locations and search bars on which to place emphasis and which keywords to use @ each location. Utilizing the linguistic nuances between segmented populations can get you in front of multiple audiences via search engine returns. Pewresearch.org/ has some great info, you may find some ideas there.
Keyword Research is valuable and inventive keyword research is priceless. I use Google search itself to do my keyword research. Try keying in what you think your target market is typing and scroll to the bottom of the page and check out the suggested related phrases. It’s quite possible that sparks some great ideas for money phrases as it quite often does for me. There is a lot more than that but this is an area that it’s best to learn by doing. So go do.
Code Re-Writing is normally needed. Renaming image files, adding all appropriate meta data, rewriting url’s etc.
I’m Stephen James Hall. See my SEO services page. Last edited 1/8/18