Monday, August 24, 2015

Making Your Website Fit for Search Engine Optimization: The Basics

Back when conventional search engine optimization as we know it was still young, businesses in Atlanta and elsewhere did not have the slightest idea of how “on-page SEO” really worked. In those days, on-page SEO was essentially all about tricking the search engines with clever tactics such as keyword stuffing, robotic-sounding copy, and even hidden text.

Making Your Website Fit for Search Engine Optimization The Basics

How the times have changed. Search engines have since become more sophisticated, enabling them to “weed” out any website they deem suspicious. To keep your company’s website from incurring heavy penalties, you need to practice on-page SEO the way it’s supposed to be done.

SearchEngineWatch.com contributor Victoria Edwards offers a rather simple analogy by likening a company’s website to a cake. Your website’s links, coupled with paid search and social media efforts, act as the icing. The content, information architecture, platform, and infrastructure act as the main layers of dough (all glazed by SEO, which acts as the sugar). Without the sugar, your cake may be pretty, but ultimately tasteless.

Keywords Are Important

To start with, you need to bring your keyword A-game. This means you can’t simply choose keywords at random. Fortunately, a good number of reliable online tools can help you find and select the keywords that get actual traffic for use on your site. Keywords are, after all, one of the major driving factors behind on-page SEO success.  We use KWfinder and Serps to do our keyword research.  They are simple to use and find long tail keywords better than other tools.

Content Optimization

Next, you’ll have to deal with the task of content optimization. To make your website content “search engine friendly”, you need to remember a few pointers. First, make sure that your page titles are keyword-based to help establish a page theme and a definite direction for your keywords. Second, create meta tags that serve as a summary of what the web page is all about. Third, carefully place select keywords throughout strategic points in page content, making sure that every keyword phrase sounds grammatically correct and natural.

Off-Site Platforms

Finally, you can’t afford to ignore other channels through which you can implement your SEO efforts. While your keyword strategy is in itself vital to your website, your campaign should extend to off-site platforms as well to maximize your online reach. Choose which channel to use, be it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Email,  LinkedIn or all the above.

If you really want to get your on-page SEO right, your best bet is to seek the help of a local Atlanta SEO firm like YEAH! Local. By doing so, you can make sure that all your efforts are on the right track.

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Atlanta Local SEO Checklist

Source:

6 Tricks To Optimize Your Site For Search Engines And People, Entrepreneur, March 4, 2015

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