How to estimate and refresh Your SEO Strategy

 If there’s one thing that’s a steady when it comes to SEO, it’s that things are always altering. Ten years ago, a good way to get your site ranked at the top of the search results was to stuff your page full of keywords and then hide them by making their color match the page’s setting. Try that nowadays and you’ll be penalized in the search results.

If you’re optimizing a newly-created website, changes to SEO tactics and strategies shouldn’t be amazing you have to worry about, because today’s SEO best practices revolve around one, some concept: quality. Awesomeness is most likely a better term for it, actually.

In 2012, Google complete over 500 updates to its search algorithm. Is it about time you evaluated where your website’s online existence stands? Here’s how to initiate your SEO estimate and overhaul your strategy.

Check Your Inbound Links

There was a time when all that mattered about inbound links was how many your website had. The more links you had, the better your rankings were. To compete in this surroundings, companies figured out particularly scalable link spam strategies, blasting forums and blogs with nonsense to create links. Link wheels became all the rage, as did link networks and link farms.

Sadly, these tactics perpetuated and permeated the industry because they worked.

But the folks at Google aren’t stupid. They caught on to these scams and started punishing websites that engaged in these tactics, while rewarding the websites that had legitimately-acquired, quality and reliable inbound links.

 Check Your Website from a Technical SEO viewpoint

Once you’ve recognized and removed or disavowed your spammy inbound links, it’s time to look at your website from a technical view. Consider these questions:

1.    Is it crawlable by search engines?

 2.    Is the content prepared logically and helpfully?

3.    Does it load rapidly?

4.    Are the title and meta tags unique and present on every page of your website?

5.    Do you have both an HTML and an XML sitemap?

6.    Are there any crawl errors or alerts showing in Google Webmaster Tools?

There are a number of other basics to check as well.

Estimate Your Content Strategy

If you have any question as to how significant content is to your website’s search rankings, So, how do you engage in a content strategy? The answer isn’t simple or short, so here are some great articles that explain, in-depth, how to get started:

Overhauling your content strategy doesn’t mean you should simply write up a bunch of new blog posts and line up them up for publishing. While that can be beneficial, start by taking some time to review what you already have on your site. When looking over your content, ask yourself the following questions:

Is my content well written?

Start with the basics. Spelling and grammar count; Not only with the search engines, but with your readers. Your content is a mirror image of your brand; and professional brands don’t make mistakes at such a basic level.

Lastly, content should be written with your object audience in mind. Make it easily readable by chunking it up into sections, and use subheaders to introduce each section. Content that looks intimidating won’t be read or shared.

Is my content purposefully segmented?

Look at your product and/or service pages. Do you have one only one page that lists all your gifts? If so, you’re likely missing out on many opportunities to rank well.

Each product or service should have its own page optimized for the keywords connected to it, along with a specific call to action.

Integrate Your Social Media Strategy

Once you’ve initiated your content marketing strategy, it’s significant to leverage social media channels to maximize your reach, build your audience, and set up your brand within your market. If you don’t yet have a social media marketing strategy, it’s time to get one .Investment in social media will become a requirement, not a luxury.

You’re going to need a robust social media marketing strategy to build:

•    Brand awareness

•    Authority

•    Trust

•    Conversion rate

•    Social signals

•    Website traffic

•    Inbound links

Conclusion

Going back to Matt Cutts video, these basics aren’t the only ones that Google uses to calculate search engine rankings, but they stand for the bulk of the algorithm.

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Google begins Indexing App Content

If you have an Android app, you'll be glad to hear the latest feature by Google for app developers. Developers will now have the choice to get their app content indexed, and that content to be opened up within the app on Android devices. This will help give a seamless user experience for users when they are alternating between websites and apps.

Googlebot can now index the content controlled within an Android app, either through a sitemap file or through Google's Webmaster Tools. This means that if someone searches for content that is contained within an app, and the user has that app installed, they will have the choice to view that content within the app, rather than just on a usual mobile webpage. For sites that have content on their main website as well as their app being displayed in the same search results, the app results will appear as deep links within the search listing.

Right now during the testing phase, indexing is only accessible to an initial group of developers. Signed-in searchers within the United States will start seeing these results on their Android devices within a few weeks.

App developers can sign up to let Google know they are involved in having their apps indexed. Developers can fill out an application of interest at Google but they should be aware that they do need to have deep linking enabled within their app . Developers will also need to provide Google with information about alternate URLs, either within their sitemap or in a link element within the pages of the website.

App indexing is only obtainable for Android apps at the time. No word yet on whether it could expand to iPhone or Windows apps as well.

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Matt Cutts about links and google rankings

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said that a website with a large quantity of pages won't automatically rank better than others. So addition more pages to your site won't help your home page automatically rank better than minor sites.

However, Cutts said that a site with more pages will obviously get more traffic because each of those individual pages can also rank for their own set of search queries, rising the overall opportunity for sites to gain visitors.

Cutts stressed how links also contribute to rankings, something that a bigger site often has more of naturally.

"Now typically if the site does have more pages, it might have more links pointing to it, which means it has higher PageRank," Cutts said. "If that is the case we might be willing to creep a little bit deeper into the website and if it has higher PageRank, then we might think it's a tiny bit of a better match for users queries.

"So those are some that factors concerned, just having a big website with a lot of pages by itself does not automatically confer a increase but if you have a lot of links or a lot of PageRank, that is leading to deeper crawling within your site, then that might be the sort of indicator that maybe sites would rank just a little bit higher," Cutts said.

So once again, while having a big site is great, those inbound links are still going to play a key role in rankings, much more so than a larger website.

"Again just having the number of pages doesn't give you a increase though," Cutts added. "It might give you a few more opportunities, but usually the only reason you get that chance is because we see more links to your website so we are willing to creep a little bit deeper and find more pages to index.

Bottom line: a larger website doesn't routinely give you a higher ranking, but the aftereffects of having a larger site, such as having more pages and more possible for someone to link to your site as well as getting overall search traffic on those internal pages, does help.

Having a large site is great, but once again you need to make sure that you have inbound links to your site in order to help it rank and get higher PageRank.

SEO guidelines: Why pick up From Google Updates? Don't Get Hit!

We've all been there at one point or another. Shoot, you may be going through one of the five stages of Google grief right now.

This summer was a turbulent one for Google algorithm updates. Since the beginning of May, we've gone through seven of them, each varying in severity, but the public outcry has been consistent: A group panics, some remain quiet, and the Interwebz explodes with "How to Recover" posts.

Wouldn't you love to be in a place when you laugh in the face of Google algorithm updates? These plans could help you get there.

1. Focus On Your Branding, Not Your Ranking

Look at the results for "flat screen TV" and tell me what the entertainment guide have in common. Do it. I'll wait.

They're all brands.

That's where search engines are going. They're favoring real company stuff over full keywords and one-way links, and you don't have to be a household name to do it. It means doing belongings like:

• Sponsoring local events and community participation.

• Giving away content (and maybe the occasional iPad) for free.

• Paying consideration to what your users want and giving it to them.

Perhaps the big brands do have it easy, not because they have the household name, but because they were around before everyone started freaking out about links, title tags, and keywords. They were doing things the right way that got them contact – well, most of them anyway – and when things went online, that did too.

2. Give Users a Good Experience

It’s really hard to have a good website that ranks well for a long period of time if it doesn't give your users a good skill. If people like your website, they come back. They share it.

We know Google is creation a push where a site's quality is more important than the number of links pointing to it:

In general, webmasters can pick up the rank of their sites by creating expert sites that users will want to use and share.

While that's still largely personally – How exactly do you define "high-quality sites," Google? – and I hate giving guarantees when it comes to search, there's one thing I'll rest my success on: Your website will always be "quality" if it gives your users a good experience.

Incorporate user experience consulting into your search and digital actions. This includes things like:

• User research.

• User testing.

• Split testing.

• Conversion rate optimization.

Visual Website Optimizer is a great means for split testing because it allows you to make layout styling changes without needing a developer, which, if your agency is like mine, is harder to get your hands on than Google's actual ranking factors. You can also set up usability testing through there if you don't have in-house income for a full user test.

But this isn't just about giving users a good knowledge on your website because, before they even make it there, they're likely interacting with you anywhere else first. Think about the links they're seeing of yours, how you look in SERPs, your Facebook posts, your graphics, everything: If you were a user, would you click on them?

3. Protect Your URLs

Outside of breaking news, old URLs will rank the best. While 301s and canonicals are heaven sent for SEO professionals, they band out a fraction of equity, and in this day and age, even the smallest amount can make a vast variation.

Unless absolutely necessary – like you're selling with a site architecture that's been picked apart and confused together so many times that it's one hot mess – keep your URLs the same. When you add new features to a product or update your service offerings, do it on the same URL.

Apple does this with each new release of the iPad or iPhone. When they launch an update, it goes to /iphone/ or /ipad/; they don't create entirely new URLs for the product they're promoting and instead shuffle the old version to a new URL. This means you're beginning a product with some equity already built up.

Summary

Let's be clear: Sustainable SEO is a time-consuming process. There are such things as quick wins – small, easy fixes you can do in the first weeks of a client appointment that prove your worth and show you mean business – but rarely will you see quick results. And that's OK: Since when does anything worthwhile ever come without a lot work?

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