When doing search engine optimization, often people will be worried about doing the wrong thing and focus too deeply into the small details and miss the big picture of SEO.
Before you start doing SEO you should first decide in which direction you want your site to go before worrying about how many keywords and where they should be in the content of your site.
Search engine algorithms are always changing and there is not a way for us to follow or predict when and what the algorithm will change so it is better to make sure your site has the fundamentals needed to keep its ranking.
Here are some good start places for the foundation of your SEO:
- Age: How old is your URL? If it is new it will approximately take 6-12 months before it’ll show up naturally in Google so that you can earn your trust by doing link building. If this is your case, you will want to look into doing paid placement advertising to get your website’s presence and brand building. Also keep in mind when doing link building you only want to associate your website with ones that are relevant to you to build Trust Rank
- Web Site Architecture: Is you site easy to navigate and user friendly? Are the most important content pages of your website within one or two clicks from the homepage or is it buried deep into the site, if so it is harder for the search engine to find and index and at the same time harder for your user to find what they’re looking for.
- Web Site Usability: This is referring to how users interact with your web site. Is your web site easy for the user to navigate through and for them to know where they are and where they can go next if they have questions; or if they want to contact you will the information be found without having to click through the whole website.
But of course you can’t forget about things like:
- Title tags are important and a great place to have one to two keywords included, but you don’t need to obsess over how many characters you should put in there.
- In-depth keyword research is a key to optimizing a web page. Because the search engines changes are constantly changing their algorithms it is really hard to rank only for one keyword on your web page.
- Meta tags are still an important place to put your keywords and site decryptions, but again, this is something you should think about after you’ve done the keyword research and know what you want to optimize your web site for. Don’t spend too much time thinking if a comma or space should be placed between each words, or stress over having too many words in there.
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com