How SEO Is Driven By Social Media

How SEO Is Driven By Social Media

In my last post I talked about getting on the front page of social media websites and the fact if you reach that Holy Grail you can expect thousands of visitors to your website. According to statistics if you get a thousand visitors maybe 5% of them will link to your website from theirs. If this is the case you have just grown your link count by 50! The more links you have coming into your site, the higher you will rank on search engines such as Google and Bing. And it goes without saying the higher one ranks the more traffic you will get.

Simple isn’t’ it J

Being ranked high up on the search engines is essential for good traffic. Most people click on the first three listing from their search results. According to AOL nearly 70% of searchers click on the first 3 results so if you are not ranking in the top 3 results, it’s a waste of time!

So now we know that (it’s actually not that much of a waste of time by the way, but it give us an idea of the importance of rankings.

So what are the four main components of Search Engine Optimisation?

1. Research

2. Content

3. Code

4. Links

Research – working out what keywords you want to go after is very important. Especially if you are selling products or services. Descriptive keywords will often convert better. For example if you are selling biscuits you can expect more sales from the term “chocolate biscuits” even though “biscuits get 10 times more traffic!

Content – The old saying “Content is king” is never more relevant in today’s competitive markets. They always used to say having “keyword rich” content is the correct way to go, but it is not true anymore. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is using content that is so keyword rich that it hardly makes any sense. The user experience is so much more important nowadays and keyword rich content can sound dull and boring.

Things to keep in mind about your content

1. Fresh content typically ranks better than content that hasn’t been updated in months

2. Content that doesn’t get old, what they call “evergreen content” is some of the best content to write. For example news posts are not evergreen, however a “how to” article could be

3. Duplicate content is a big no no; you should not publish duplicate content. That means you should not cut and paste content straight from other sites, Google can see this quite clearly and it would be detrimental to your rankings. By all means research your subject by reading other similar content but write your final article in your own words.

Code – Your websites code needs to be clean and well written and there are 8 main factors of SEO that we have to learn about. These factors are extremely important and are often over looked or just not done thoroughly. Do these steps correctly and you will see a big impact on your traffic

1. Headings

2. Meta Tags

3. Title Tags

4. Sitemaps

5. Domain name

6. URL structure

7. Site structure

8. Alt tags

Headings

Think of headings as book chapter titles, they are used to describe what each section of your webpage is about. If you are familiar with html you will know of the heading tags such as H1, H2 and H3 for example. The idea is to have each heading contain keywords that are relevant to the content on the page and that it describes again what is actually within the page.

Meta tags

You would think the keyword Meta tag was the most important but that is not actually the case. The most useful Meta tag is the “descriptive” tag.

Search engines use the Meta descriptions tags on a website within their search results. If you Google “lamb’s wool jumpers” for example the Meta description show under the title in the search results: “Wool Overs Est. 1989. Your one stop shop for fine quality traditional ladies and men’s Lambswool Wool Jumpers.” The description under each search listing is taken from the Meta description tag.

Some guidelines for Meta description tags include

· Making sure each page has “a unique” meta description

· The description is no longer than 150 characters

· Good keywords are in the description

· And make sure the description is an actual full sentence as spoken by a human!

Title tags

Very similar to the description tag, when creating titles for you pages make sure:

· Every page has a unique title

· The title is no longer than 80 characters

· Keywords again are in the title

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are xml or html files that sit on your server waiting for the spiders to come. They make the spiders job much easier as they can crawl your whole site in one place indexes all your lovely pages

XML sitemaps are the best as they can handle more pages, actually millions and millions of pages. You can automatically create an XML sitemap by going to the XML Sitemap Creator website. Once you have created your sitemap you need to submit it to Google Webmaster Central and Bing so that they crawl & index your website.

Domain names

Domain names made up of your keywords rank higher than ones without. Exact match domain names rank even higher. For example if one of your good performing keywords was “lambswooljumpers” a high ranking domain for that keyword would be http://lambswooljumpers.com as opposed to http://woolenjumpers.com

However sometimes it is not a good idea especially if your company has a solid branding name.

URL Structure

It is best to keep your URL’s nice and tidy and easy to read. Search engine spiders have a hard time reading messy URL’s which means they can’t crawl your site, which it turn means you will not get indexed.

Some factors to remember when creating URL’s for your business are:

1. They should not contain dodgy characters ($@!*%=?)

2. Shorter URL’s are often better and often rank higher

3. Numbers & letters only should be used

4. Use hyphens instead of underscores, search engines prefer them

5. Sub-domains also rank better than sub directories

Site Structure

Cross linking is a huge factor when it comes to how you are ranked by the search engines. Cross linking is linking pages within your website and out to others.

Here are some good pointers on cross linking:

1. Links within your content tend to be better than links within a sidebar or footer

2. Keep you links on each page to under 100

3. Use the “nofollow” attribute on outgoing links which are junk, such as links to a Feedburner page

It is also a good idea to block pages such as your terms & conditions or privacy policy pages. This can be done by editing your robots.txt file.

Alt tags

Alt tags are used to replace images that don’t show, search engines can’t read images so the “alt tags” provide a description of the image so the search engines can read what it is. For example if you have a picture of a pinapple, you would tell the search engine that the image is a pineapple by using an alt tag.

Alt=”pineapple”

In addition to the alt tags, you want to make sure the image file name actually pertains to the image, pineapple.jpg as opposed to image3.jpg

Getting Linked Up

Ok we have left the best to last, linking is the most important part of SEO.

Things you need to know about getting linked in:

· Links within content are more effective than links in a sidebar or footer

· Link from related sites are better than links from non relevant sites

· Anchor plays the most important role in link building. If you want to rank high for pineapples then the anchor text of the link needs to be pineapples!

Things to avoid:

· Links from spammy or irrelevant sites

· Site wide links can hurt more than they help

· If all you links are rich in anchor text, it can hurt you

· Reciprocal links are not to effective

· Bought text links can be banned from the search engines

Here are a few ideas to increase your link count:

1. Efficient use of social media

2. Submit your site to directories

3. Get links from sites in the top 100

4. Hang out in relevant forums and make good use of the signatures where you can link back to your site

5. Find out who is linking to your competition and contact them telling them about the benefits of your site over the competition. According to statistics 5% of the websites you email will also add “your” link.

6. Dead links – there are billions of links on the internet, so millions of those links will be dead. Websites go down, but often the sites linking to them don’t, so if you email that website telling them how they have a dead link but their readers can find the same information at your site, they will most probably replace it with yours!

In Conclusion

If you can manage to do all the things we have talked about in this post, your search engine traffic will increase. But it won’t happen overnight, it can take months for any results to show. So it’s a bit of a waiting game where a lot of patience is need.