Welcome to the start of another new year. Of course it is time to roll out those ubiquitous New Year’s resolutions. These are the promises we make to ourselves for what we will improve in the coming year. Everyone resolves to lose weight, manage their time better and spend more of it with loved ones. However, most of us are lucky if we can keep one of these resolutions past the first week. To succeed in online marketing you need resolutions that you can maintain the whole year through. So in keeping with the theme, I present my list of resolutions for better SEO success in 2011.
For 2011, I resolve to:
1. Get more social with search campaigns – Bing and Facebook announced a partnership back in October that may impact the search algorithm on that site. It is too early to tell how that will affect Bing or ultimately Google rankings, but it’s a good idea to make sure you are building strong networks in Facebook, Twitter and other social sites.
2. Make search listings more click worthy – There is some evidence that click-through rates (CTR) are getting more important for organic search. Google recently added CTR of listings, by keyword and by ranking to Webmaster Tools so it is likely they are measuring this. It isn’t good enough to just optimize your pages, you want to make sure that your title and Meta description both contain the keywords you are targeting and that the results are call-to-action driven, that they entice the user to click on your result instead of someone else’s.
3. Think about mobile search – 2011 may shape up as the year of mobile. For those who say that mobile users aren’t using search, I would suggest that they are, but differently. Mobile search is going to be more location driven (Google Places) and more about price shopping (comparative shopping engines may be a good fit here) as opposed to more early stage research for a product or service.
4. Remember the basics – Chasing the latest algorithm shift may sound exciting, but make sure to go after the basics first – good title tags, good keyword rich content and optimized URL structure before you try out advanced techniques.
5. Be creative with link building – There is no doubt that link building is essential for a successful SEO campaign. Find creative opportunities to organically expand your link profile in order to stay ahead of the competition.
6. Isolate organic analytics data from the rest of your campaigns - Although it is helpful to understand your entire traffic picture, it is important to analyze your search campaign separately. SEO is data driven. You can’t make future changes to your campaign without understanding what set of keywords and phrases are working.
7. Address site speed and page load time concerns – There is some evidence of a direct correlation between time spent downloading a page and the number of pages that are crawled.
8. Deep link within content to relevant pages on the same site – Provide links with relevant anchor text from within the content of higher level pages to the deeper pages of your site.
9. Submit Google local listings (when relevant) – In many search results pages Google local listings are being mixed in with the traditional organic listings. If your business has a local presence, go ahead and submit your local business listings to Google. There are still some issues with local service providers who often provide services in a particular area, but don’t have a physical address there. There are some workarounds there, but hopefully Google will fix this issue in the future.
10. Remember Bing - Now that we are in a “Two Search Engine” world with Ask shutting down their organic listings and Bing driving Yahoo’s index, it’s a good idea to verify your site in Bing Toolbox and manage your sitemaps and monitor your indexing and crawl frequency.
11. Continue identifying opportunities in search – Every day there are countless sites and niches that aren’t well optimized and aren’t positioning themselves for maximum search visibility.
The trick with New Year’s resolutions is to keep them going once January ends. Hopefully you can follow some of these resolutions all the way through to 2012. Good luck and much success in your SEO endeavors.
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