The 8 fundamentals of a successful SEO strategy
SEO is used for the sole purpose of pleasing Google’s algorithm but as Google’s algorithm becomes more and more advanced the focus of SEO is shifting to a more authentic purpose of pleasing the user and engaging them in natural and organic ways. Google’s fundamental goal is to deliver the most valuable and relevant content for each search query and so should be of any SEO strategy.
Following are some important formulae for successful SEO strategy.
Keyword Research
Keyword selection is a core part of SEO strategy. The goal is to select keywords and phrases that give a high traffic to your site and has a strong commercial intent. Once done it is generally best to be committed to the successful ranking of the chosen keywords and build on their success.
Website Backend
The platform and code on which your website is built upon must be SEO friendly. The website needs to be easily understood by the Google bots and ideally easy to manage in to optimize the URLs and other SEO elements of the website.
Target Pages
There can be great value in selecting or creating targeted pages in your website that can be the focus of specific keywords and phrases. You need to create a topical relationship between your keywords and web pages. Never to forget that homepage is the most important page on the website.
Keyword Targeting
Each page on your site is generally an information or content about a specific topic. There are certain aspects of each web page that need to be specifically targeted for keyword inclusion.
URL: The main keyword or keyword phrase should appear in the page URL. This helps the search engine for determining what the page is all about.
Page Title: The most important keyword for the page should feature in the page title at least once.
Headline (h1): It is a best practice that the main keyword or phrase appears in the main headline of the page.
Images and image alt attributes: People also sometimes search images and it is always the best practice to have an image on each page. Alt attributes provide some image keywords relevant to your site to help you rank in Google image search.
Meta Description: The meta description is your advertisement in the search results so it needs to be keyword relevant and appealing and engaging.
Page Content
Page content plays a vital role in SEO and each target page must contain at least 400-600 words with the target keyword at least twice. Its good idea to include appropriate semantically and topically related keywords and phrases. The content must be unique, valuable and more than just self-promotional.
Sitewide Content
The selected keywords or phrases for the SEO strategy and their semantic and topically relevant keywords should be appropriately placed throughout all the pages of the website. To get the more organic result the content of your website should be rich in valuable and useful content that surrounds your chosen keywords.
Internal Linking
The quality and quality of internal links on a specific page and the anchor text used in those links can assist in determining the authority of that page with respect to other pages on your website. This helps google in selecting a specific page on your site relevant to the search query keyword of the user.
Social Sharing
Signals from social network are becoming more and more vital component of SEO. It is important that it is easy for the visitor to share your content. This directly refers having obvious social sharing buttons on the page. Also, be sure that your content is good enough sharing. The major social medias in today contest are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc.
Sometimes in SEO doing too much of something may lead you to a worse situation and hence you need to be very optimal. Always remember to appear natural and organic and have a good care of user experience.