Search Engine Marketing Best Practices: Website Optimization

Website optimization can help ensure your site stays at the top of search-engine rankings.

Your company is growing, business is good—yet your company’s website isn’t ranking where it should. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in and where website optimization for SEO is critical.

Over the years, SEO has evolved like almost all other facets of digital marketing. If you “got it” even two years ago, you don’t have it now. Let’s look at some of the website optimization needed to make your site reach the top of the search engine rankings.

Content marketing and SEO go together like biscuits and gravy. They work together to accomplish the goal of optimal placement in search rankings. Good, compelling content is critical to the success of any SEO marketing strategy, because the two overlap. Instead of thinking of SEO and content marketing as two different strategies, think of them as two components of the same strategy.

• Content marketing and SEO go together like biscuits and gravy. They work together to accomplish the goal of optimal placement in search rankings. Good, compelling content is critical to the success of any SEO marketing strategy, because the two overlap. Instead of thinking of SEO and content marketing as two different strategies, think of them as two components of the same strategy.
• In addition to adding new content to your site, keep your current content fresh by doing periodic content reviews. Google will prioritize a site that has more up-to-date and relevant content over a site that is growing content cobwebs.
• Tools, tools, tools—you shouldn’t try web optimization without them. Google Analytics delivers deep insight into traffic reaching your site, including sources and user behavior. The Google Search Console gives you notifications from Google about any issues Google has with your site and your search performance. And Bing Webmaster Tools shouldn’t be overlooked, either.
• SEO plugins simplify optimizing content. Plug-ins help teams not skilled in developing content-optimized SEO adjust text to better match your SEO strategy.
• Make the search engines lives easier by adding metadata to each of your site’s pages. For example, by telling Google that your about page is an about page versus a services page, helps the algorithms to pair a users’ search query with the most relevant page. In other words, you’re taking the guesswork out of the equation.
• Ensure your team performs keyword research for paid and organic search and for important elements of your site’s content and digital advertisements.
• Backlinks and internal links are important to how search engines grade your site. Ensure all your links work, or you’ll get dinged. And make sure sites other than yours link to your content—having quality content helps make this possible—and ensure your content links to other content on your site, too. Sites pointing to your site and people flowing through your pages help your site’s relevance, which search engines measure.
• Site speed is one of top criteria search engines use when serving search results.
• Create an XML sitemap and submit it to the Google Console. XML sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your website and all the pages they need to index.
• Voice search and digital assistants, like Siri, Google Home, and Amazon’s Alexa, have changed the way people search online. Keep this increasingly popular search method in mind—and incorporate more natural language phrases over short keywords—to make your site more accessible for voice searches.

We could keep going. Yep—these are just a few of the considerations for keeping your website optimized for search.

Website optimization is just one component of a larger and more complicated system that needs synchronization to achieve your desired marketing results. This means that a real best practice for search-engine optimization is to bring in experts.

Need help with website optimization and SEO? Contact FrogDog today.