 Content

This is your content marketing end of page optimization and is hugely important more so now than ever. Quality content can make or break your site. Your pages need to well written, have substantial helpful content targeted to the subject the page is about. Also, make sure that your content isn’t too light – you want to follow what we discussed in the content marketing description and write what is appropriate Still, you want to make sure it is not too thin, that is a place for twitter. It is important that the keywords and golden phrases that you are targeting the site for in search, appears in the body content and part of its dialogue with out being spam-like. What this mean is if I find your site by looking for “Golden Widgets” then that page had better have the term “Golden Widgets” in it; in fact it would have to, but even better is if that is in the headers and titles to stress its importance and maybe even get you a higher rank.

Some may say that this is not true today and that it is a new age. Until the search engines are able to discern searches based on feelings, expect to see keywords and expect them to get you on the search results pages. Just don’t overuse them and become spam. We will set you up with an engine that can help you here to analyze the proper amount of golden keywords you use on a page. Successful marketing keeps an eye on this and adapts to it. Read more on our content marketing philosophy page.

 Keywords & Headings

A big part of search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO is your keywords, as we mentioned in the content section. This means you need to do keyword research if you want to most effectively show up in the results and get the larger amount of traffic. If the keyword “Golden Widgets” after research shows me that the amount of people searching for Golden Widgets is pretty low but something very similar like “Yellow Widgets” is much more popular, then you might make a call and write the article focused on yellow widgets as the phrase you want to be found for and put in golden widgets as a secondary for the more long tail target client. These keywords need to appear in your content; you need to use the words and phrases that you are hoping will show up.

Headers, then, are a part of your content and you would know them as headings. If you use your keyword as a heading just like an editor using Yellow Widget as a newspaper heading, you are telling the reader and the search engine that this is important. Both are going to take it into consideration. Furthermore, you can tell them on a scale of 1-7 how important it is to the content on the page, from the largest heading (traditionally) to the smallest simple mention or bold version of the phrase on the page. Headings are both important to the structure of the page content- wise and can visually guide the viewer as well. Don’t leave them out.

 Titles & Descriptions

When you go to a search results page and you see the blue link that directs you to the page, the words there are the title and they also appear at the top of some browser tabs. Titles are the most important place to tell the search engines and viewers what the page is about. Here is where you define your number one keyword and purpose – in our example we would put “Yellow Widget”. Do not forget to use these. Otherwise it might default to something meaningless like “Home”. You also may want to put a little more there, but not too much your characters are limited so “Yellow Widget Explained or Purchase Yellow Widgets” could work.

Then there is the meta-description. When you see a search result you often see the keyword phrase as the blue link on top and then the meta-description which is the description of the page you see at the bottom. Successful will set you up with a place to describe the page purpose in your admin and you will want to use it. How often have you as a searcher looked at the results, then quickly scanned the description on each and decided to go to the third link instead of the first because that description made more sense to you? It happens all the time, so make sure to fill that out.

 Images Names & Alt Tags

Originally a usability effort for the visually impaired, users images, names, and alt tags still have a lot of value. This means when you name your image, you need to make sure that it makes sense, so instead of IMG243.jpg, name it Yellow-Widget.jpg. This is a habit you should get into, both for your website and for you and your poor designer when organizing your images – especially if you are doing a gallery.

The same goes for the alt or alternative tag, which you will want to make descriptive and, importantly, make sure it is relevant to the image itself. So you might say “Yellow Widgets in Factory”, or something similar. Successful encourages you to do this, and we mention this because we have had clients who refuse to and it affects them. Another very important benefit to having properly named files and alt tags is that that is how Google finds its keywords for placement on its image search. You would be surprised how much traffic you can get from the image search; Here is another opportunity to capture the interest of a new client.

 Words of Warning

There are a number of technical black hat SEO techniques that we won’t go into here. We are sticking with a few key ones that you, the publisher, may run into. Keep in mind the risky part of SEO and that is that sometimes the search engines will punish you for putting out bad content or content that doesn’t deliver what you have led through your keywords. If you use keywords that falsely advertise what you are promoting, you will get higher bounce rates, which is when a user gets to your page and leaves quickly. This tells the search engines that you are not giving good content and your page should not show up in their results.

Another guideline is to not stuff your site full of ads (particularly at the top) as this will affect your bounce and is considered a basic no-no for searches. Don’t get me wrong though, the search engines love ads and that is how they make their money. They just get upset if you overdo it. Remember the prime directive of a search engine is to give the user the most relevant results to their inquiry.

 Page Load Speed

A faster internet makes everyone happy and the days of sitting waiting for a page to load are beginning to end. A slow loading page loses SEO points and the slower it loads the worst it gets. More important now with the rise of mobile browsing we expect to see this metric get more and more weight. Successful will work with you to best optimize for a quick page load time. We want to reach 1.4 seconds or less for full load. That is not always possible, particularly with image- heavy gallery areas or too many weighty special effects and some other considerations when passing high levels of data or downloads.

The biggest take- away from page load speed is that you do not want to be slow. We may agree with you at times (and in fact we are doing this with our own site) that taking a slower than 1.4 page load is worth it if we can you an effect or a big image we feel helps the viewer or assist with a conversion. We need to aim for the goal and make a choice if we need to sacrifice. Load speed is something you will want a strong company like Successful to help you with since there is a lot of behind- the- scenes optimizations that one could do.

 Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

Secure Socket Layer (SSL / Technically TSL) is a communication protocol that affects the security of you and your users data. This is for general web browsing, e-commerce, email, instant messaging, and other data transfer, and it is quite technical. What you need to know is that Google recently decided that SSL- enabled sites would get a boost – a boost that is going to grow each year from now on, which is important. It makes sense to us and we are happy they are doing it. Data transfer security for everyone is clearly essential. Whoever you choose to go with, make sure that whatever your site is, to get SSL- enabled. You want a successful site then you want this – it costs about $80 a year, though that price will probably go down over the years.

 SEO Friendly CMS

WordPress is by far the friendliest SEO enabled CMS out there and one of the reasons we go with it. We are serious about this claim and after having worked in and compared a number of the competitors over the years, we remain convinced. However, if you want to go with another CMS since if may fit you better in some important way, we are happy to support that as well. Just let us know. WordPress does need some modification from out of the box, such as additional SEO plugin, setting your URL permalink structure, template optimization, duplicate content cleaning, and site structure. The essence is perfect, but, just like a lot of things, needs a little extra tweaking to make it a Successful site.

 Hosting

Hosting and SEO matters primarily because the search engines notice the server speed, up time, location and ip address as well as the type of hosting. We customize these options for you after we talk and find out the scale of your business. We look at your amount of content, site traffic and make adjustments so that you always have some capacity to spare. We also keep an eye out for what is called “bad neighborhood” which means if you are on a server that has some other spam sites you could be punished; it’s considered guilt by association for being on that server. We keep an eye out for this and keep you out of bad neighborhoods. If you choose to host with us or with another, make sure to consider these aspects when you make your decisions. It really matters.

 Website Navigation

Hosting and SEO matters primarily because the search engines notice the server speed, up time, location and ip address as well as the type of hosting. We customize these options for you after we talk and find out the scale of your business. We look at your amount of content, site traffic and make adjustments so that you always have some capacity to spare. We also keep an eye out for what is called “bad neighborhood” which means if you are on a server that has some other spam sites you could be punished; it’s considered guilt by association for being on that server. We keep an eye out for this and keep you out of bad neighborhoods. If you choose to host with us or with another, make sure to consider these aspects when you make your decisions. It really matters.

 Linking

Successful will set your basic link structure or permalinks so that is will make sense to the user as well as to bots. This means they need to be readable and if possible contain the primary keyword of the page so out with: http://yourbustedsite.com/1232/itemu3ir134.php, and in with: http://yoursuccessfulsite.com/products/yellow-widget-skunumber . Try to keep links as short as possible, and avoid uppercase letters and underscores as they can still cause issues. Our platform will assist you with this by adding dashes between words and keeping them lower case. Another type of link structure that we highly recommend is internal links. This means to link within your site (always use the http:// absolute url though) whenever possible and when it makes senses. This helps the spider and the user get to relevant information when reading an article or a page.

If on the Yellow Widgets page you tell the user that in order to use this feature they have to get Yellow Widget Accessory 1, then link straight to Yellow Widget Accessory 1 page directly in the text. Don’t make them have to explore and find the product in the site when you can just as easily give them that option right there and you probably want to back link on the Accessory 1 page. It makes sense doesn’t it – we are just trying to make it as easy as possible for everyone to find what they want on your site. Finally, keep your site clear of broken links. We will set you up with web master tools. You will want to go there and make sure that your broken links are removed, resolved, or redirected. Broken links can cause all sorts of errors and should be avoided. With a non-Successful site we are happy to run a site audit for you and find these types of things out.

 Robots.txt | XML Sitemap

We use a Robots.txt file to tell the search engines what page to index and what not to. We disallow entire directories that we don’t want them in, and in some cases have disallowed entire search engines for specific reasons. The Robots.txt is a simple file, which all sites should have. It is up to the search engine to honor them and most do. You also want an XML sitemap to send to the search engines to let them know what pages are on your site, those pages’ priority and how often you expect their contents to change. It just helps the search engines get to all your pages and show them in the results – it is necessary. Successful uses software to automate this and we set up all the different options for you as well as setting it to re-update the bots on occasion.

 Local Search

Local search or localization is very important to many businesses and you need to be on it if you are a local vendor. Be happy if you are local since it makes it easier to compete locally than globally. You have a much better chance of showing up as “Pismo Beach Yoga Studio”, rather than you do when listed as “Yoga Studio”. A lot can go into a localization strategy and we offer a package to help you with this.

One of the most obvious things can be to include your name, address, and phone number, but not email address (that is how spammers get you -they go through websites looking for email addresses and once found, start sending you spam) throughout the site. We often recommend having this on every page at the bottom in the site footer. You will also want to claim your local profiles with the social networks, on maps (with a KML file), in a schema as well as have an actual map embedded in your contact page so people can get directions right there on site. Let us know with this one we can help you do it all and Succeed.

 Rich Snippets

One of the newest entries to search are rich snippets, microdata, and microformats, which is what cause an image or a video to appear in your common search result. Do a search and you see a smiling picture of somebody and that is because of these – it affects products, music, apps, and more. This is definitely something you want to use. Immediately, it gives the searcher a visual cue to click on the link and it is powerful, huge, and from all the data we have reviewed, having a big effect. We can set you up with them and train you on how to use them – you really want this to give you another edge on Success.