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SEO Practices In 2018

Written by Carson Schenk | Jun 1, 2018 1:00:00 PM

You have just launched a new website and want to drive traffic to your landing pages with your service offerings.  But what if you are new to the SEO world?  Start out my learning "What SEO is and Why it Matters."

Learning SEO basics and how it works, is fundamentally the first step of practicing the best SEO techniques. Developing a search engine optimization strategy will help you pace and properly track the success, or failures, of your campaigns.

Local search engine optimization campaigns are a great place to start.  SEO is important for your business.  Performing regular SEO for you website will ultimately increase your search rankings.  Organic rankings on a larger scale will require high local search rankings.  So, this is a great place to get going with organic seo basics.

SEO Strategy Best Practices

Developing your SEO strategy is where your research and knowledge will be your greatest asset.  Using your top search keywords, do some keyword research.

Top KPI’s might include:

  • search terms with goal conversions
  • event conversions
  • leads
  • sign ups
  • purchases.  
  •  
  • These do not have to be how you develop them, but this seems to be the standard.

Titles and Subheadings

Implementing your focus keyword in the title is essential.  The title tag tells the search engines what the content on the page contains.  Utilizing the focus keyword in the title helps increase the chances of search engines matching you with the search keyword.

Make sure you have proper on page structure.  Arrange the web page’s content in order of ranking importance.

  1. H1 - Title/Topic Cluster
  2. H2(s) - Relevant Keywords
  3. H3(s) - List Content

Topic Clusters and Focus Keywords

Let’s play out a scenario.  You are a business owner that is selling garden goods on your eCommerce website.  After doing your keyword research, you decide that “garden goods online” will be your focus keyword.  The keyword here should be the title and focus keyword, for a higher probability of a gradual increase of organic search rankings.

Crawlable Webpages

Search engines, like Google, use bots or spiders to crawl web pages to gather information about the webpage’s content.  Google uses a program called, Googlebots, to collect you websites content. Not allowing search engines to crawl your page would be devastating to any SEO strategy.  Make sure you have the right txt files in order for best results.

Internal and External Links

Googlebots crawl page to page through urls.  Hence the url slug. This is the last page of the url structure.  Example: http://artscube.biz/seo-best-practices.   Implement your focus keyword here for best practices.  Be cognisant of using stop words into the slug of the url.

Assuming you have implemented keywords relevant to your focus keyword, add internal links relevant with these keywords.  This allows Googlebots to better understand the dynamics from page to page, link to link.

External links should be attached to external sources.  Link to pages that are high ranking pages with relevant content to your specific webpage.  But be careful not to link to pages implementing the same focus keyword you are attempting to increase rankings.

Backlinking

Backlinking is the base of Google’s Search algorithm.  This is what Google was built on and remains an essential factor in search rankings.  Developing and building backlinks can be very challenging when getting started. Signing up for services, like HARO, is a great way to get your content to the right audience while creating backlinks to your website.

Help A Reporter Out, HARO, is a great resource that connects reporters with your unique content and establishes you as the source.

Need help with your website's SEO? Schedule a consultation about how to implement proper SEO.