SEO Strategies for Search Engine Success

We’ve broken down the basic strategies of SEOto its simplest form – the ABC’s. Follow these guidelines and your website can have a chance at search engine success.

Architecture – The way your website is designed, or coded, could mean the difference between success and absolute failure. For this, you need to think about the back end of the site. Is the html code easy for the search engine spiders to read? Are keywords part of your site’s navigation? Do you have a link to an HTML Site Map on each page? If the answer is no to any of these questions, then your website’s chances of being shown in a search engine result go down drastically. (Hint: If your website is a Flash design, it will not be easy for search engine spiders to read.)

Backlinks – Having links from other, quality websites to your site tells the search engines that there is something of value on your website. Creating compelling content, writing guest blog posts and getting “social signals” (likes, mentions and shares from social media sites) are just some of the ways to create backlinks. Get creative with it!

Content – As mentioned above, compelling content is a must for any website nowadays. The content must be relevant to your website, of course, and adding new content on a daily basis is highly recommended by Google.

True search engine optimization is actually a lot more complex, but putting a strong foundation in place for your website is a great way to start.

Google Chrome and How It Can Affect SEO

This week Google Chrome launched and personally I find it to be really useful. As far as features go, the navigation bar works double as a Google search bar and as you type, you will see related search queries and even domains to visit that are either the #1 ranking organic Google result or pages that you've recently visited relevant to that query.

This means that if you are a company that wants to rank for a specific term, it's to your benefit to be in the top #1 spot, which now will mean the competition will be tough if you are in a niche that is competitive. Online branding for your company also becomes even more important since typing a company name in the search/navigation bar should automatically come up with your brand name as a URL suggestion.

Being that Google Chrome just came out, there is a lot more room for improvement, such as being able to add extensions and other plug ins to make the browser more personalized for the type of user you are. I'm definitely looking forward to that!

If you haven't yet, learn more about Google Chrome and its features, including videos about each one.

Why Did My Rankings Fall in Google?

Yesterday, Google held it's second live webmaster chat event. During the event, Jonathan Simon discussed why webmasters can fall down or even out of the Google rankings.

Duplicate Content was cited at the top of Jonathan's list. It can be caused by multiple URLs, syndicating content and even scrappers pulling content from several sources and sticking them together. Ten Golden Rules Tip: If you have duplicate content on your site, be honest about it. Disallow those sections in your robots.txt. Syndicate your content carefully, ensuring that your original work gets credit through a text link or require posters to exclude your article in their robots.txt.

Server Issues are another factor that can effect your rankings. If your server is down or timing out because it's being over taxed, the Googlebot might arrive at your site, ready to spider it and find nothing there. Ten Golden Rules Tip: Make sure you're hosting your site on a reliable server. And if you do some viral marketing to boost your traffic, make sure your hosting company is prepared to handle it.

Competition might have made recent changes to their SEO campaign, either by improving their content offering or getting more link love from authority sites. Either way, it spells trouble for any company that's sitting on their SEO laurels. Ten Golden Rules Tip: The best never rest. Just because you have great SEO rankings today, doesn't mean you'll have them tomorrow, so keep adding new content, building more quality links to your site, and show Google through your hard work why you should be Number 1.

Changes in Search Trends can also affect your rankings. Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to improve their results. One factor might be weighed more heavily one week and less the next. Ten Golden Rules Tip: Follow SEO best practices and don't stress about Google's tweaks. Your rankings might flucuate here and there. However, give it some time to level out before you start making changes to your SEO campaign.

Webmaster Guidelines Violation by your staff or 3rd party vendor can have a serious negative effect on your Google rankings. Ten Golden Rules Tip: Make sure you know who you're working with. If your site gets flagged for a violation, fix the problem and then submit your site for reconsideration.