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Essential Search Engine Optimization Strategies


Digital Marketing

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Unit Video

Unit Summary

The four practical tips to success with search engine optimization (SEO):
  • Indexation and Accessibility
  • Site Speed & Performance
  • Keyword Research
  • Link Building

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Build Your Action Plan

Search engines have two major jobs: discovering and building a directory of all web content, and providing searchers with a ranked list of the most relevant websites and content based on what these people are looking for. As such, making sure your web properties are being found by the people who need your services should be an essential part of your marketing plan.
In this lesson, we’ll show you how to succeed with SEO, and give you a few practical tips along the way.
  • Indexation and Accessibility
    You could have the best website in the world, but if the search engines can’t properly access, crawl and index your site none of that matters. This applies to search engines as well as your human visitors. Look out for the following:
    • Titles: Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest.
    • Keywords: Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.
    • Links: Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.
    • Quality: Try to publish unique and quality content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.
    • Freshness: You need to add new content on a regular basis
  • Site Speed & Performance
    Making your site faster and perform more efficiently is not only great for user experience but search engines love it to. In fact, Google penalizes slow websites with lower rankings, so make sure you measure and enhance your performance on a regular basis, Here’s how:
    • Use Cloud flare or other CDNs: Content delivery networks essentially create copies of your website in the cloud, and deliver your content to users from the nearest server. This cuts down on wait times but also protects your site from vulnerabilities.
    • Optimize Image Size and Formats: Pretty simple, smaller file sizes load faster. It’s important to minimize image file sizes, while maintaining the best possible quality.
    • Validate your Code: Ensure your websites’ code is error free and W3C compliant. Browser errors can slow page load times and make pages difficult to read for both humans and search engines.
    • Optimize Website CSS and JavaScript: Compile all your CSS and JavaScript files into to one document for each and compress them for added.
  • Keyword Research
    While SEO continues to evolve, one thing remains the same, Keyword Research, here is how to do it right:
    • Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
    • Brainstorm some keywords or phrases that you think people would type in related to that topic
    • Research related search terms. Google Keyword Planner, Trends or Autocomplete are great ways to get suggestions
    • Search for keywords you can win, i.e. ones that are relevant to your business, can drive significant traffic and have moderate competition.
  • Link Building
    If we think of the web as a vast city, then links are the streets that connect each page. Building links not only helps generate referrals traffic, but also help build credibility and authority for your website. Here are a few key tips to get started:
    • Internal Linking: Ensuring your pages are properly linked to each other internally. Pages should be only a click away from each other.
    • Get links from authority websites in your niche. Find where authorities in your industry link to and are linked from and think about how you can get involved.
    • Social Media: not for the links themselves, but to get your content noticed by the people most likely to share your type of content.
    • Create Linkable and Distribute: You need a catchy story of your brand or a trending topic in your industry that is tailored to a specific group of audience.

Speak to your audience in their language about what’s in their heart. Jonathan Lister