3 SEO Essentials
For SEO there’s been some question around the value of backlinks from social sources such as Twitter & G+. Are they worth it? Should I spam the bejesus out of the networks with my backlinks. In case you’re wondering, the answer to the latter question is no. In today’s video I revisit some data from a client that we began work on about 3 months ago. Below is the graph of their organic traffic growth.
Their traffic went from pretty much nothing to over 230/day by us just doing a few of things.
1. Be SEO Ready
This basically means have a tidy well functioning site for your visitors with the content clearly signposted. In the case of this site we had to do the following;
SEO navigation
We found that the site had many internal 404s that needed to be fixed as well as internal 301s. An internal 301 is bad as it is sloppy. (which reminds me there’s a few I have to fix on this site) . Why have a link on a page that is permanently redirected? Why not just link to the final destination. We also found there was not much strong linking internally to the target pages.
SEO Headings
This is a problem we see a lot, heading tags been used for style reasons. I know, I get it, you graphic designers out there are just trying to make it easier for your clients but if we get our hands on it we are going to change your beautiful heading tags so that they are proportionately correct and change that lovely formatting by using <span> or <div> . In the case of this client they had multiple h3s on a page above h2s.In fact at the time of writing this post I can see it on this page! Aaargh. My h2s & 3s look exactly the same. Hopefully by the time you read this it will be fixed.
2. Content Marketing & SEO
We are spending a lot of money on quality content. I’m talking thousands of dollars per month. It is so important. In my digital marketing post I discussed the various forms of 20th century marketing and their digital equivalent. For content marketing the only equivalent I can think of would be the old sausage sizzle for customers. In the past that was pretty much as close as business got to being social. Think of it this way, today you have to publish or perish. I don’t care where that publishing is, email, facebook, web whatever. For your business you need to be doing it. For SEO purposes of course I want you to publish on your website.
For this client we are pumping out a few posts a week. Not junk, Google fodder content. This is quality content that users are engaging with.
3. Share is SEO Gold
As you will see from this week’s SEO video Google is very hot on Twitter shares and G+ shares. This is great. It makes sense though right? A share is a backlink. A real citation. The difference today though is that Google can also put a value on who is sharing that content purely from authorship. That is the only backlinking we did for this client. Just twitter. Not spamming just sharing their content via their own Twitter account.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
