7 Steps to Successful SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results. These results are referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. As a matter of fact, there are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.
Below are my 7 steps that lead to successful SEO:
1. Set Goals: It is useful to align your SEO with the goals of your business. Who are you trying to get out of the SEO? The selected goals must be measurable in order to organize the strategies to achieve them. Measurable goals consist of: doubling the number of site visitors, increasing blog traffic, attracting new customers, and increasing sales.
2. Keyword Strategies: While using relevant keywords could also bring enormous traffic to your business. Having keyword strategies is essential to developing search engine marketing campaigns. Keywords consist of terms and phrases your target customers would use when defining themselves, your business or product. Again, SEO is about creating a connection with the customer, by understanding your customers you can create more effective content.
3. Accessibility: What will help search engines find your content? Research shows that search engines and customers like text. Whatever you copy and paste from a page and put into a program like Notepad or Text Edit, that’s what they’re going to “see.” Images are helpful as well if you name them correctly. Keywords are used in image descriptions and saved names, to help Google’s algorithm identify the content on a much larger scale.
4. Analyze Content: Over the years, Google has been able to identify businesses that take shortcuts in the SEO process to boost their rankings. It is essential in making sure the structure of the content is readable and that your keywords, tags, and titles relate to your content. Content that is not well structured will only decrease the site’s rankings. Making the search engine’s happy will make things much easier in the long run.
5. Page speed: Best-in-class web pages load within 1-3 seconds. Any slower and visitors will abandon their journey to your site. Google also uses this information in their algorithm. We want users to spend as much time a possible on our sites. To perform well on search engine results pages, you need to ensure your site loads quickly using the page speed test. Use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to check your page speed.
6. Develop sitemaps for Google and Bing: Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.
7. Links: Use Social Media: Lastly, If your content is original and well structured, you will reach new audiences by through social media. Tweeting or making posts on your blog can land on the feed of someone who may like your article. Of course, all social media gives your posts the potential to go viral and reach the feeds of customers you’d never thought you would reach.
Additional SEO Links
In addition to my 7 steps, my classmates have great steps as well from their perspective. Check out Brice Hulstrom’s view of what it takes to create successful SEO.
Yoast 2018 WordPress SEO Walkthrough