By Michelle Strassburg
Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the amount of web traffic finding your site through unpaid search engine results. If you haven't so far, you'll soon discover that optimising your content site is essential in today's business climate for a number of reasons. To name just two, you'll discover that some web users will only click on an organic search result, so all the advertising money in the world won't make them click on your ad. The second reason is simple: organic traffic is free. Let's get to work.
Here are a few golden SEO tips for content sites:
1. Use The Page Title and Page Description Fields Correctly - Each page should have unique metadata which is comprised from a page title and page description. To optimize your site for Google, limit the page title to 70 characters and page description to 150 characters. The information in the page title and page description should describe the informative nature of the page. It's important to pay attention to content duplication and avoid using the same page title or page description twice across the site.
2. Do Smart Link Building - Building the number of links pointing to your blog or site naturally is an important factor which the search engines look at when determining your ranking. However, the emphasis shouldn't be made on quantity, but rather on quality. In particular look at niche directories which are associated with your industry, blogs, or forums. You could even try to get a link from your clients. To check who's linking to your site or the progress of your link building, use one of the free backlink checkers.
3. Optimize Your Images For Search - Optimizing images across your site or blog can help increase web traffic from Google image search and normal search. The key is to use a descriptive file name for the images and use the image alt text field. For example, the image pillow-cases.jpg has a much better chance to rank for 'pillow cases' than pillow2397.jpg. In addition to driving up traffic from image search, naming the image correctly will help the page itself rank better in normal search, as search engines are able to read the alt text field of the image.
4. Find 404 Pages and Fix Them - 404 pages and "page could not be found" will result in a pooruser experience. And if those pages have some back links pointing to them, you're missing out. To find your 404 pages, you can use the free utility xenu which will test all your pages one after the other and report back its findings. Another option is to use Google Analytics. Most 404 pages have a page title such as 'page not found' so all you have to do in Google Analytics is head to 'content' then 'content by title' and type the page title. Click on the page title to view the problematic pages and fix them.
5. Add Quality Content - An important factor for ranking well is to constantly produce quality content. For content sites it can take the shape of reviews, useful tips, and even how-to guides. If you're struggling to find ideas for new content, use the wisdom of the crowds and search for ideas on Twitter trends or Google trends.
I hope my SEO tips will point you in the right direction. Any tips you'd like to add?
Michelle Strassburg is Head of Sales and Marketing at online wooden worktops vendor Wood and Beyond. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing.