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SEOSimple Steps to Improve Your Company
Website’s Search Engine Rank and The Importance of Blogging and Social
Media as Part of SEO
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What is SEO SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization
Meaning: The practice of growing the visibility of your website in organic (non-paid) search results.
How it works: Search engines contain automated search bots, called “crawlers” or “spiders” which find pages, decipher the code contained in them, index and store the selected pieces in databases that can be recalled later during a search query.
How can I optimize my website for better search engine results?
Many elements of SEO are built right into the HTML code structure of your website. Let’s talk about a few…
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META TagsThree tags that reside in the <head> of your HTML Code, these are your Title, site description, and keywords. Title Tag: This tag helps search bots understand the theme of your page. It’s best to limit this tag to less than 65 characters because Google will only show the first 65 characters in search results.
META Description Tag: This tag offers you space to elaborate on the pages theme, using the META description tag does not guarantee that the search engine will use your description, make sure the description uses key terms you hope the page will be found for. Google will only display the first 150-155 characters of your description.
Meta Keywords Tag: Once important, many search engines no longer support the META keywords because of spamming issues and keyword stuffing. It’s up to you whether you add it to your code or not.
<HEAD><TITLE> My Site Title </TITLE><META name=”description” content=”Description of my site page goes here.”><META name=”keywords” content=”Site keywords go here”></HEAD>
CODE EXAMPLE
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Other Types of Text Tagging
Header Tags: Header tags often appear in bold and larger font than body text, and act as a title or subtitle for a content area. Header tags rank importance starting with H1, then H2, H3 etc.
Bolded or Strong Terms: simply put, terms which you have bolded, in code these terms are given a “strong” attribute.
Anchor Text: is the keywords you’ve used to create a hyperlink. By creating a link with a keyword phrase you are directing the search engine that they can find information on that keyword on the following page.
Header Tag:<h1>Header tag</h1>Bolded or Strong Terms:<strong> Important content that needs to be emphasized.</strong>
CODE EXAMPLES
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Image Tags Image alt-tags: Alternative text provides a text alternative to non-text content in web pages, and was originally developed to optimize web accessibility for those with visual or cognitive disabilities.
Why it’s SO important:
Image alt-tags help to properly index your images. A search engine will use the alt-tag to match your image to any search queries that also contain the text in your alt-tag.
CODE EXAMPLES
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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That wraps up the HTML elements that can help you with SEO. But wait there’s more! Let’s take a look at how Link Signals, and Social Signals, also have the power to affect your search results!
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Link Signals Link Signals are the elements a search engine uses to assign value to a link. They include things like global popularity, topic specific popularity, anchor text, TrustRank, whether the link comes from or links to a site that has been labeled as spam, freshness and social media popularity.
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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Blogging and Link Signals
Blogging is important to SEO because of it’s a very effective link building tool.
1. Blogging consistently creates new links for your website.
2. Blogging creates linkable content for social media, often called Linkbait.
3. Blogging creates links between you and other authoritative blogs on similar subject matter.
4. Blogging creates more opportunities to have optimized content, utilize keywords, and create internal
links.
Blogging is an important link building activity, and links are an important factor in SEO!
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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Social Signals Social Signals are the likes, shares, views and any other activities associated with posts on social media. These social signals have now become incorporated into search engine ranking algorithms.
Since 2011, Google has incorporated social signals into its search results. Today if a searcher is logged-in to their social media while completing a search query on a search engine, content shared in a searcher’s social circle will show up in the search results
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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Social Media and Search Results
Social Media is important to SEO because it is also an important content promotion tool.
The content published on social media can link back to the existing URL you are trying to improve in search results.
The best way to achieve this is to post a URL I’m trying to promote from my website to social media, so that the social media post now links back to a page on my website. Thus, generating links and hopefully traffic or popularity, both elements that are important to search engine ranking.
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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SEO Best Practices Limit Flash, Javascript, and Ajax: Make sure content is not buried inside these types of rich media. Content included inside these is not able to be indexed by search engines.
Be Descriptive and Accurate: Title elements, those within the <title> attribute, and alt elements, those within the <alt> attribute should accurately reflect the content on the page, as well as utilize keywords you want search queries to produce your page for
Don’t put content you want indexed in an image: For example, if your company name and address should be searchable content and not part of an image featuring the company logo.
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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SEO Page Viewing Tools Want to see what your company website looks like to a search engine? Try viewing your page through a tool like Google Cache, SEO-browser.com, or MozBar.
Knowing what your site looks like now to the search engines is a great place to start improving you SEO!
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
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Sources Comstock, R. (2012, September 23). Aligning SEO Strategy & Social Media Activity to Build Links. Retrieved June 8, 2015, from
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207423/aligning-seo-strategy-social-media-activity-to-build-links#
Fishkin, R. (n.d.). SEO: The Free Beginner's Guide from Moz. Retrieved June 8, 2015, from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Soric, T. (2010, March 18). Overlooked But Beneficial On-Page SEO Elements. Retrieved June 8, 2015, from http://searchengineland.com/overlooked-but-beneficial-on-page-seo-elements-38286
Soric, T. (2010, February 10). Unloved, But Still Important: How To Leverage Meta Tags. Retrieved June 8, 2015, from http://searchengineland.com/unloved-but-still-important-how-to-leverage-meta-tags-35886
<img src="/images/MississippiRiver.jpg" width="79" height="62" alt="The Mississippi River Delta Map" /></a></div>
Images Page 1: Derek Finch, https://www.flickr.com/photos/sagesolar/
Page 2: Got Credit, www.gotcredit.com,
Page 4: http://www.instructables.com/id/Wood-burning-with-a-magnifying-glass/
Page 6: Mark Hunter, http://mjhunter.posterous.com/social-media-life-workstation
Page 7: Nogran S.R.O, http://www.nogran.sk/viete-ako-pisat-kvalitny-blogovy-prispevok-10-rad-ako-na-to/
Page 9: Jason Howie, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonahowie/
Page 12: Karlnorling, https://www.flickr.com/photos/karlnorling/
