Spring is here, and growth in the digital space is ramping up very quickly. Before you embark on plans to increase your organic traffic, it’s important to clean out the old, stale SEO and start preparing your site to take advantage of this growth.
Here are 7 tips for ensuring that you are maximizing the organic traffic potential of your website.
1. Create High Quality, Original Content: Invest in content creation. It isn’t enough to just post content on your site. Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm has shown that sites using tactics to game the system with low quality content, or simply reusing content generated by others, eventually will have their rankings reduced. The lesson learned here is that your site MUST provide high quality content, because that is what your audience is looking for. For an ecommerce site, don’t just copy the manufacturer product description, but create your own descriptions, and make sure that your users can add in reviews, and other user-generated content. For publisher sites, use analytics data to provide insight into the type of high quality content that your user base demands.
2. Fast is Better than Slow: Google has built an empire on that mantra, and over the last year, site speed has become a significant factor in the search algorithms. Test your site speed frequently to ensure that both users and crawlers can access your pages quickly and effortlessly.
3. A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words: Video is probably worth 10,000. SEO no longer just applies to only text on a page. Your images and video files should be optimized for search. Make sure that image files are named properly and use ALT tags. Optimize your video files and submit a video XML sitemap.
4. Remember that SEO is Becoming More Social: The launch of Google +1 is one more step in making search more social by providing a user-focused social context for search results. The search engines are already looking at Facebook and Twitter data in determining relevance. Over time, Google WILL use +1 data as one more “signal” for determining the relevance and ranking of a page.
5. Mobilize Your Site: Make sure your site is viewable on the major mobile platforms, as well as accessible to the mobile search crawlers.
6. Remove the Roadblocks: It still is surprising how many sites aren’t set up properly to allow search crawlers to access the site. Make sure the robots.txt file is set up properly. Create and submit an XML sitemap file so the search crawlers can easily find all the pages on your site. Ensure that your navigation is crawler friendly.
7. Analyze – Go Beyond the Ranking Report: We can never say this enough, but rankings are not SEO! SEO means driving relevant, engaging and actionable traffic to your website. The only way to grow traffic is to spend time in your analytics tool to know where current traffic comes from, how much it engages with site content instead of immediately bouncing, and what words and phrases are bringing in this traffic. Data is key to measuring the effectiveness of the SEO efforts and positioning your site for growth.
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