Cathy Stucker - The Idea Lady

Attract Customers and Make Yourself Famous

A Simple SEO Checklist

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Free search engine traffic is an amazing thing. It can grow your business by bringing you new subscribers and customers. But the thing is, you have to work at it. And it seems as though the search engines are always changing the “rules” about how they rank sites.

Even so, there are some things you can do that will usually help your search rankings as well as increasing customer engagement and often bringing traffic from sources other than the search engines. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, keep this checklist handy to steadily grow your traffic.

For Your Off-Page SEO

These are things that will affect your search engine rankings from outside of your web page. These are very important for growing the overall popularity of your site and make it easier for you to rank well for your chosen keyword phrases.

  • Create excellent content because it affects the following:
    • How much your content is shared on social media…this provides important clues to search engines about the quality of your content.
    • How long a search engine user stays on your site. If searches on a search engine and finds your site, but clicks back right away, it will tell the search engine that you may not be very relevant for that phrase.
    • How often your content is linked to. If you have good stuff, people will link to it…but beware, search engines can detect quality links, so old self-linking practices are dead.
  • Ways to ensure you’ve got quality engaging content that attracts users and search engines:
    • Each page should be on one unique topic.
    • Your navigation is clear and all your content is easily found by humans and search engines.
    • Use relevant, attention-getting headlines to grab your visitors’ attention and so they know they’re in the right place.
    • Make your content easy to read by using short sentences and paragraphs. Keep your words simple.
    • Break up your copy with subheads and bullet points, so viewers can scan it easily…instead of having them click away.
    • Use images to draw the eye in and tell a story with your content. Humans are visual creatures and photos and other images can help retain their attention, as well as a good site design, as stated at https://www.sandcastle-web.com/.
    • Don’t forget to connect with other website owners in your niche. Friends tend to share the content of others, so this is just a win-win for all of you.

For Your On-Page SEO

In addition to the big overall picture of creating great content that makes its way around the web, there are things you can do on each page you post to your website. Here is a list of some of the things that can affect your rankings, but remember…don’t overdo it. Keep your optimization natural and make sure it makes sense. Otherwise you might alienate both your visitors and the search engines.

  • Make sure your content is at least 300 words long. I usually aim for 500 – 800 words.
  • Conduct keyword research to find a highly targeted phrase that gets decent traffic, but doesn’t have too much competition. Try a tool like WordTracker.com or the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
  • Use your keyword phrase in the title of your post and in the title tag, but make it sound natural to human website visitors. Don’t repeat the keyword – just use it once.
  • Use your keyword phrase in the description tag for your post. Make sure the description not only includes the keyword phrase, but is interesting enough to make people want to click. Although the description tag probably does not affect how your site ranks, it may be shown in the search results and affect how many people click to visit your site. Make sure it includes your keyword phrase and an accurate description of what is on the page.
  • Incorporate the keyword phrase into the URL of your page. For example: fun-family-vacations.html
  • Add the keyword phrase and other useful description to your images with the use of ALT tags.
  • Employ the use of H2 and H3 tags. They make your content easier to scan and are also a good place to include your keyword phrase and variations of it. The H2 and H3 tags are for headings. They tell both human visitors and search engines that content within the tags is especially important.
  • Include the keyword phrase and variations of it in a few places in the body of your content. Try to include it in the first paragraph.
  • Show you are a hub of useful information and link out to a related page on another website, especially authority sites.

Keep track of your rankings and tweak things as you go along. Just remember, it can take a bit of time before search engines update their listings, so give your changes time to come into effect.

Source: https://web20ranker.com/category/search-engine-optimization-tactics/

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Does Google Send You Too Much Traffic?

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search-the-web.jpgIt seems that everyone wants to be #1 in Google, and get the traffic goodness that flows from that. Even if you are not at the top of the search engine rankings, you may find that you get a large percentage of your visitors from Google. That is not necessarily a good thing.

There is nothing wrong with getting a lot of visitors referred to your site by Google. However, if those visitors represent 30%, 40% or more of the traffic you receive, you need a new plan. If the Google algorithm changes, or Google penalizes your site for some reason, you will see a dramatic drop in visitors–and the income they produce.

Start by taking a look at your web site statistics. How do people come to your site? There are three general ways: search engines, links from other sites, and direct entry.

Chances are, most of your search engine traffic comes from Google. Obviously, you do not want to receive fewer referrals from them. Instead, you should diversify so that you receive more visitors from other sources. Let’s say you are getting 1000 visitors a day to your site, and Google sends 40% (400) of them. Other search engines account for 20% (200), links another 20% (200) and direct traffic (type-ins, bookmarks, clicks from email) the final 20% (200).

If you could generate an additional 300 visits a day on average from sources other than Google, you not only have a 30% increase in traffic, you have reduced Google’s percentage of traffic referrals from 40% to 30%, making you less dependent on the traffic from Google. Even if you see an increase in Google referrals and the percentage of traffic they refer to you stays at 40%, the overall increase in the number of visitors will help to insulate you from any changes affecting future Google referrals.

Does increasing your traffic this way sound impossible? It is not. Although it probably will not happen overnight, it can be done with a few simple steps. Here are some ways to do that:

Optimize areas of your site for other major search engines, such as Yahoo! and Windows Live. Although all search engines look for some of the same things when ranking sites, each has their own algorithms and weighting and generates different results. You can learn more about optimizing for all of the search engines at http://www.SEOSmarts.com/

Get lots of links. The search engines all like to see lots of quality links to your site, so getting more links will help your rankings. But the links also bring more people to your site, and that is the more important result in this context. Look for ways to get one-way links from authority sites and quality sites in your topic area.

Get active in social media. My logs show visitors coming to my site through Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and other social media sites where I have a presence.

Encourage people to bookmark your site. That can mean saving it to their Favorites, or on a social bookmarking site such as delicious.

Ask visitors to sign up for your RSS feed or email updates. If your site generates an RSS feed (as all blogs and many other sites do) use a service such as Feedburner to offer visitors ways to be notified when new articles appear on your site.

Start an email list. Use a service such as Aweber to collect email addresses and send a newsletter from time to time. Include links to recent articles and other resources on your site to encourage readers to click through. I find that sending a newsletter results in a traffic spike at my site every time.

Add new content frequently to encourage visitors to return often. Tools such as bookmarking, RSS and email newsletters are great at reminding visitors to return to your site, but you have to give them a reason to do so. When you update your site regularly, visitors will come back to see what is new.

Implementing some or all of the above ideas will get more visitors to your web site and make you less dependent on Google for traffic. Get started now and you can see results within days or weeks.

Watch for my upcoming series on specific way to get more incoming links and bring more people to your website or blog. Subscribe now, via RSS or email, so you don’t miss a thing!