March 4, 2017

Search engine optimization can be a fickle @#$%&. There have been times in my 10 years as a digital marketer where SEO has made me celebrate like the woman pictured above and there have been times where it has made me cry like Jordan. The reason for such an emotional swing is that we only have some control over the success of our SEO campaigns. The rest is up to the secret algorithms search engines use to rank sites which are guarded more heavily than the recipe for Coca-Cola or the Colonel’s chicken.

What are the aspects of search engine optimization that we can control you ask? Well, we can control the keywords we select to optimize our site, the content we add, the backlinks we earn and the structure of our URL’s. To make this a bit easier to digest, I put together the below questions you can ask yourself to determine if your site is properly optimized for search engines.

1. Is your website optimized for 5-10 keywords?

Selecting a set amount of keywords to optimize your site is one of the first and sometimes most crucial steps to any SEO campaign. Many businesses often make the mistake of picking far too many keywords or picking keywords that may be to broad to attain. If you’re just getting started with SEO, it’s recommended that you pick 5-8 keywords that are 2-3 words in length. You’ll be more likely to rank for these keywords because they are longer in length and less likely to have competition.

2. Does your website include a blog?

Blogs are a benefit to SEO in more ways than you think. First, blogs are an efficient way to regularly update your site with fresh content for not only your website visitors but for search engines as well. Secondly, blogs give you additional content for you to share on your social media, which is beginning to have an effect on rankings. Lastly, updating your blog with interesting, unique content also increases the likelihood that someone will link back to your articles from their website – giving you the all important backlink. Speaking of backlinks…

3. Does your website have quality backlinks?

A backlink is a link from another website to your website. The “quality” aspect of backlinks comes in when we talk about the text used to link to your website from another. Preferably when another website links to your website, they’ll link using your brand name, services, product or one of your selected keywords. You can keep track of who’s linking to your website and with what text by signing up to Google Webmaster Tools. It’s free to use and provides quality information on the status of various aspects of your website within Google.

4. Is your website using proper URL structures?

When your website links from page to page does it link using keywords? What about the URL’s for those pages? Are they properly named? URL structure is an important aspect in SEO. The URL’s for your pages should be named using the 5-10 keywords you selected at the beginning of your plan. For example, a page titled “Car Accident Injury” should have this type of URL structure http://www.example.com/car-accident-injury. When you link to that page internally the link should include the words “Car” “Accident” and “Injury”.

5. Are the META tags on your website optimized?

Last but certainly not least we have META tags. META tags on a website provide META data about an HTML document. They are often only read by search engines but there are 2 important tags you’ll want to update on each page on your website. The “title” tag and the “meta description” tag provide not only search engines information about your website but they’re also the ones that show up on search engine results. The blue links that appear on search engines are directly correlated to your “title” tag and the brief text below the blue link is tied to your “meta description” tag (see image below).

BONUS – 6. Is your website mobile-friendly?

In April of 2015, Google announced that it would begin using whether or not your website was mobile-friendly as a factor in their search rankings. That means if your website is not built for mobile viewing using responsive code your website may receive a lower ranking in search results. Nearly 60% of all searches completed on Google are now done with a mobile device so Google wants to make sure those users end up on a mobile-friendly website that’s easy to navigate, read and view. A quick way to test if your site is mobile-friendly is to use Google’s own test site.

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If you answered “Yes” to 4 or more of these questions your website is well on its way to earning top 3 rankings on search engines, congrats! If you answered “No” to 3 or more of these questions, you may want to consider re-evaluating your SEO with an expert.