If you’ve noticed a decline in your website traffic over the last few years, Google’s algorithm changes likely played a role. In February of 2011, Google rolled out “Panda,” an algorithm which aimed to boost rankings of websites that it considered to be more usable and unique. Websites that didn’t offer a good user experience and were full of “copy and paste” style content did not fair well.
If you’ve yet to address the problems on your website, or if you’re working on a launching a new site and want to be sure that it’s optimized for Google – we have 4 SEO tips to help you.
4 SEO Tips
Create Quality Content
First and foremost, write quality and informative content for your website visitors. Try not to focus on page length. If your page has 200 or 700 words on it, that’s totally fine. Generally, we recommend to our clients that you have at least 200 words on a page and that you make sure your content is focused around just one topic (which would be your keyword or keyphrase). It’s fine to have a page that is 205 words and then another that may be more detailed and exceed 1,000 – as long as your content is informative, easy-to-read, focused and well-structured – the length of a page isn’t a big factor.
Another important thing to remember is not to repeat yourself, if you have duplicate content on your website – take the time to clean it up. While it didn’t matter so much before Google’s Panda update, today – Google considers it spam. If you would like to reference content (which exists elsewhere on your site), link to it instead of repeating it (or copy and paste it). Also, be sure to never use auto-generated content. This will cause a big hit to your site’s rankings.
Let Your Keywords/Keyphrases Happen Naturally
The old school rules of SEO caused many people to overpack their pages with keywords, causing the content to sound repetitive and unnatural. While it’s still important to use the keyword or keyphrase you want your content to rank strongly for with Google, it’s important to let those words happen naturally on a page.
Google sees the overstuffing of keywords as a rather devious strategy. However, it does appreciate when you use different variations of those words/phrases. It sounds better, looks better, and makes Google happy. It’s a win-win for everyone.
Have User-Friendly Navigation
While this won’t only make your visitors happy, it will make Google happy as well. You might have the best content in the world, but if your visitors can’t locate it on your site – it won’t matter. Make sure your navigation stays consistent and concise across all pages of your site. Try to narrow down your navigation to no more than 7 options. Dropdown menus are fine to better organize content and offer visitors additional browsing options, just ensure it makes sense to your target demographic.
Utilize Social Media
Google wants to see more than just a company website. They want to see social media profiles, reviews, and an active community or following for your brand. The more content you have supporting your brand online – the better your rankings will be with Google.
Use this opportunity to have fun! Create a content strategy, a social media strategy, and even a video series – or work with us to help you put all of this together. We can even execute it for you, so it’s one less thing for you to worry about (Take us up on a free consultation!)
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We hope these 4 SEO tips will help you get started in optimizing your website, but if you still have questions – that’s what we’re here for! Take us up on a free consultation and let us excite and engage your brand’s fan following!