SEO Best Practices

SEO Content

With SEO, the current buzz phrase is content marketing. That changed from the previously popular term, organic SEO. The SEO marketplace evolved from a place that previously used a litany of techniques that were questionable at best. Commonly called black hat SEO, the abandoned methods of yesteryear included keyword-spammed meta tags and meta descriptions.

When you work with SEO Expert, a content management system is included as part of your site’s implementation. Original content written by subject matter experts ensures that you get proper credit from Google to increase your organic results.

SEO Architecture

When you’re developing a site, it’s important to spend a good deal of time developing the site architecture, or a site that’s simple to navigate and makes sense to users. Unique domain names that fit your business and your brand might be difficult to come by today, however new extensions mean that they may not be as difficult to find as you might think. But it is a vital component in developing that site.

A good SEO company will analyze your site speed, file nomenclature, folder naming conventions and URLs to ensure the optimal keyword density. It will analyze your content to ensure it flows logically from beginning to end and that visuals and graphics truly complement the content and overall look of your site. These recommendations are then implemented to help increase your results based upon Google’s latest search algorithm updates.

SEO File Nomenclature

Perhaps there is nothing more elusive to most web developers than a simple way to organize and name thousands of image files based upon specific criteria for each product page, category page and landing page throughout an entire e-commerce site. This is where file nomenclature comes in. All the while, the developer has to somehow keep proper SEO best practices in mind in order to avoid inadvertently keyword spamming the site with too many keyword hits.

This is where SEO Expert brings its decades of combined experience into the fold. With the inherent knowledge of already having been through multiple e-commerce site refreshes with this very issue at hand, SEO Expert brings the exact expertise required to ensure risk is mitigated and SEO gains are maximized.

HTML for SEO

HTML, or hypertext markup language, is the code that controls what your site looks like to your audience. It tells the site where to send links, what the fonts should look like and how large images should be. It also provides valuable information to search engines when they search for keywords in your images, headers and meta descriptions.

A full technical site analysis will empower your SEO specialist to improve your titles, descriptions and headers. From your meta tags to your file names, many attributes have an incremental ability to increase your rank on the search engine results pages.

Backlinks

Quality links from reputable, relevant sources will improve your Google ranking over time. Creating these partnerships and business relationships with organizations within your vertical market is difficult and time-consuming. We will help you increase the number of quality white hat links coming into your site.

Think about the relationships you’ve established in your business already. Whether it’s from colleagues, sites where you’ve guest blogged or local networking partners, you can keep those relationships going by asking for links back to your site and providing them to others. The more other organizations link to your content on your site, the more relevant the search engines will see you as. It’s one of those useful and vital off-page SEO strategies that we’ll explore for you.

On the other hand, we’ve seen some black hat practices where SEO “experts” have linked to irrelevant sites on other sites they host. These hidden links don’t do anything to help your SEO and search engines will find them and label your site as spam if you participate in this unethical practice. The only backlinks you should be seeking out are those that are from legitimate businesses who are within your market, and the larger the brand the better your SEO will be.

Domain Management

SEO Expert understands how the domain name, settings relevancy, and keyword density all affect the results of Google’s latest search algorithm updates. It’s vital that you stay on top of your domain to ensure its privacy and that its ownership stays in your hands.

Of course, you also need to protect your domain from spam and hackers—something a quality password can help you with. While it’s tempting to go with the same password that you use for your bank log-in or your email, your business depends on you using a solid password that’s difficult to hack. In addition to password protection, there are a number of additional privacy features that need to be addressed when hosting a site that conducts business—especially ecommerce.

As your business grows, so will your site. If you’re not prepared to deal with subdomains and subfolders or consolidating data within your site, you’ll be in for a surprise when the time comes. Start early with a domain manager like SEO Expert so we can grow with you and head off any issues before they start.

Reputation Management

By never using any type of “spam” techniques, we will ensure that you don’t run afoul of Google’s rules and regulations regarding bad SEO. You don’t want to be accused of black hat techniques when it comes to promoting your business online, which is why we only employ white hat techniques. And we also help you manage your reputation in other areas of business.

Poor reviews online can hurt business, and that’s especially frustrating when the reviews aren’t valid. Some companies even pay others to write bad reviews on their competition’s profiles. This is simply unethical. Luckily, these spam reviews can often be tracked back to their original sources and dealt with accordingly. It’s important to stay on top of these and know how to manage them effectively—and SEO Expert can do that.

SEO Personalization

The best part about the Internet is that it connects so many different people from all walks of life. That same positive experience creates a challenge for webmasters to meet the demands of such diverse groups from different places. We will ensure that the personalization of your site meets the needs of your target market.

Through targeted analytics, we know where your ideal customer lives and hangs out online and we can personalize search results so you get found in their searches. We can also help fine-tune your keywords so they speak directly for your business. We keep an eye on your competition so we know what they’re up to, and them beat them at their own game. Targeted content can also help personalize your site for your target audience by providing content for specific geographic areas.

SEO Requirements

Certain aspects of SEO are musts—from H1 tags to meta descriptions, alt text and file names. Without these as part of your site, the search engines won’t find you. And each of these elements has its own requirements, from size to coding, that you must adhere to. The positive side is that once these elements are in place, they’re not likely to change. That leaves you or your site manager to keep an eye on the more important pieces of your site, like security and fresh content.

Social Integration

By integrating our solution with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and any other social platform that pops up in the future, we will ensure that your site increases its reach via the viral nature of social media. Further, this will help to increase your organic ranking.

Social integration includes adding share links to your static pages and your blog posts and including links to your social platforms to the main banner or footer. This allows users to share your content on their own social profiles or find out more information about your business on your social pages.

In addition, optimizing the profiles on each of the platforms also ensures that your keywords get noticed on them. Sharing your content and curated content regularly on the profiles where your audience spends the most time will also help drive traffic to your website. Hashtags and social ads add an additional layer to your social prowess.

SEO Video

One of Google’s latest search algorithm updates included the parsing of voice to text. Using video as a part of your site, whether hosted within your site or included as a part of your site’s embedded YouTube Channel, will significantly improve your site’s overall SEO performance.

Other video platforms are making a huge splash in the social media realm, including Periscope and Blab. We’re keeping a close eye on how these are going to impact SEO, but we’ve already seen an incredible surge in SEO due to these new tools. And with the ability to embed these videos on your website and employ SEO strategies on the host site, there’s no telling where they’ll take us.

Best Practices Change

Of course, as technology grows and changes, so do the best practices we currently employ. It’s imperative that your SEO expert, like us, stays on top of the latest trends and best practices. When changes occur, you want to be at the top of the learning curve so you can stay ahead of your competition. And we know, like any good business person, you likely don’t have time to stay on top of SEO trends yourself. So hire someone to do it for you and you’ll never wonder if you’re going to be left in the dust.