How can you position yourself in a way that would allow your business to be future proof? We all know that what works well for SEO today is going to change tomorrow. Whether it’s being good with Google, managing social signals, getting the right analytics in place, UX design or just plain innovating to ensure that you’re ahead of the curve, you constantly need to be at it so that it’s moving in the right direction.
SEO is about marketing. It’s about marketing online and getting your business to the people who want to use it. The most direct clues you can pick up about your marketing efforts won’t necessarily come from your analytics program. Your sales team will know exactly how your customers are reacting to your choices. And, even better, they will advise you on what they want to see on the website. Go ahead and ask what your clients have on their website, see what their teams are doing, pick the best of their ideas and try to implement them into your strategy.
Make contact lists. You can use email forms, Facebook pages and Twitter followers. Other options like Pinterest and YouTube may not necessarily suite your business requirements. However, keep building your lists. Not only do social building efforts have an effect on your brand image with search engines, they also allow you direct contact with your clients. You will be able to directly learn from them and keep innovating your product line to suit what your demographic needs. In our view, the biggest advantage of building lists is that it allows you to be agnostic to search engine updates and ready for the long run no matter what.
Link maximization. There’s a new animal from Google’s bestiary about to make a walk onto the field. It’s a Penguin with a 2.0 outlook. The new Penguin is designed to clean out link spammers. Google doesn’t like to get fooled by people gaming the algorithm and continually uses new techniques to weed out the bad guys. If you’ve been using software to build links to your website, you need to watch out. Google launched a link disavow tool, and you should use it to remove links that you feel are not in your best interest. These are links from websites that are not naturally in your neighborhood. For example, if you notice that you are getting links from a website that has more posts about medical products or adult themes, you should ask Google to disavow the link. Keep in mind there are a lot of people who continually use the disavow tool, and Google now naturally understands what bad neighborhoods are. If you’re continually getting links from those websites, don’t expect your website to do well.
Clean content. Ensure that the new content you are putting on your website is not just for search engine ranks but has an overview for all the customers that will use your website. For example, if your website is about food, you may naturally have something written about travel even though the two are not necessarily related. Make sure your content is original and that you’re adding regularly. This isn’t just an idea that works for search engines. It also naturally works well for your customers.
Write good content. Ensure that you cover current and relevant trends. Visitors will read your content, stay longer on your website and return. These demographics are easy to track for Google. For example, if the first search result always causes the user to search for the same term again and then not search after he has visited say the tenth website, Google understands that the website at results number one isn’t covering what the users wants to know but the tenth one is and will automatically start pushing the tenth one up in the results.
Most of the tips we have suggested are quite natural in terms of progression for your website and will happen over the course of time for any business. Just as in real life a brand would make a name for itself over varied references and marketing efforts, it’s much the same online. By spending time and effort, you will naturally come out on top!