Playing the SEO Game
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in today’s digital world is more important than ever. Even if your marketing plan is to drive traffic via paid ads – the benefits of SEO can have significant impact on visibility and user experience. Plus, for any competitive webmaster, SEO offers an opportunity to make strategic changes that enhance daily site progress.
Benefits of practicing good SEO
Understanding the concepts behind a well optimized site and applying them offers two distinct benefits to any online presence. First is understanding user search intent and how your pages can provide what your users want. The second is to help search engines understand your pages in order to serve your content to users. Do this well and search engines will find your content, understand its value, and index your webpages to be delivered to satisfied users.
Daily progress in SEO
Progress in a site both organically and through digital strategies should always be at the forefront of any webmaster’s agenda. Staying focused on the three basic principles of SEO – Technical, On-Page, and Off-Page can have long term compounding effects that can drive a mediocre site to excellence.
Technical SEO
First and foremost is making sure your site is developed properly in order to encourage search engines to index. Sitemaps, speed, internal linking, structure data, robots.txt files, organized content, and making sure the site is secure are just a few components to good technical SEO.
On-Page SEO
A process of page layout that helps both search engines know the content of your page for fast indexing and making sure the content is understandable to human eyes. Keywords, heading tags, content, images with alt tags, and internal linking are all part of on-page optimization. Both need to be balanced properly in order to keep users engaged when served an indexed page.
Off-Page SEO
As important as internal site linking is, so too are external links or off-page SEO. Search engines use a method of trust to determine a page value and quality backlinks from reputable sources increases its potential benefit to a searcher. Look at it this way – when a search engine receives a query it searches millions of indexed pages for the most reputable results – a stand-alone page with high quality content is less likely to get served than a comparable page with hundreds of quality backlinks pointing to it.
All three factors work together to form a well optimized site and offer the potential for daily progress. The goal is a delicate balance of understanding the basic principles of SEO and monitoring regularly for results, both positive and negative, in order to make changes as needed.
Monitoring SEO Results
The importance of regularly monitoring search results can’t be overstated. A watchful eye is important to make sure any changes made to the site via technical, on-page, or off-page SEO are not having a negative impact on performance.
For instance, this graph shows a newly launched noptim managed site with decent early results in mobile useability. No errors, and regular growth up until December 28th, then a sharp decrease in results began to appear.
A good webmaster would have documentation of what transpired on the 28th that may have caused the drop in results. In this case a plugin was installed and conflicted with another causing the drop. Left unaddressed, the trend would have continued rather than the correction shown here.
Add site to Google Seach Console
Adding a site property to Google Search Console offers a wealth of information from performance results to pages with errors and suggestions on how to fix them. Taking advantage of the free tools offered by Google and paid tools like SEMrush can be beneficial to organic site performance.
At noptim, we like to look at SEO as a strategic game. There is no quick and easy solution to a well optimized site. Hard work and a committed effort to see daily progress for our clients keeps us competing at a high level. For more information on how optimization might benefit your digital strategy please visit our SEO/SEM Services page.