If you’ve been eagerly watching your website rankings since Day One, you’ll know how frustratingly often the rules keep changing. To begin with, if yours is a business website, you may have hired someone to make your website SEO compliant. You may have learned how site structure and Meta can affect how many people see your site, and how linking is important for visibility as well. You think you’d done everything right until:
Rankings Fall Unexpectedly That’s a sign Google’s changed its algorithm, AGAIN. Your website changes position drastically and you don’t know what’s wrong until you read somewhere that social media is ruling the Google searches in an uncompromising way. And you were expecting your Facebook profile to handle itself. That is, if you even have a Facebook page for your business.
In the current scenario social media is a big player in how search engines throw up results, and this status quo is likely to continue for a while, at least into 2013. Now, Google respects Facebook and Twitter reputations and its search engine results take into account the author’s social media profile such as tweets, shares, retweets, but traditional SEO is still valid. This can be confusing, as you can’t decide:
What You Should Focus On Do you pay attention to driving traffic to your social pages? Or should you focus on drawing readers to your website? It’s hard to know where your online brand exists, and how to communicate your brand value. That’s why you need search engine optimization training to help you cope with the changing rules.
Some Tips for Coping with the Scenario Rethink your keyword: To make your brand searchable across social media and through standard SEO techniques, you will have to re-evaluate your keyword optimization. It’s no longer only about visibility of your brand on searches. It’s about competition, and about what your brand means. What do you want your customers to say about your brand? In what terms do you want them to discuss you? Answer these questions; it will help you come up with accurate keywords that work.
Define Your Brand: You must be uncompromising about branding – don’t make it confusing, make it unified and unique. Every part of your team should be in on the unique message that you are trying to send across to your audience. Only then will your message be conveyed with force and become credible to people.
Have a Strategy: When you have your keywords, you must have a plan in place to effectively utilize them. Make sure your plan of action includes mention of the types of content and the frequency of posting and monitoring and analysis of metrics to gauge how effective your strategy is.
Keep SEO Basic in Mind: In the hope of jumping the Social Media Optimization bandwagon, don’t forget about the traditional SEO practices, as they still apply. Make sure that you follow on-site optimization practices every time you are looking for conversions from your web marketing plan.
First Steps to Immunity With Google’s constant attempt to root out the bad websites, it can be hard for legit sites to cope with the flushing, despite having good content. Many website owners give up at this point, not knowing enough about optimization techniques. But are you content in letting Google blow you away? If you answered No, the first thing you should do is to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, where the school rules are. But remember that everyone that’s making it in the top ranks is following these rules. How can you beat them?
You can find yourself someone experienced and qualified to teach you how to stick to the rules, and slightly, legitimately, bend them at the same time. And then you’ll find yourself back in the radar of your potential customers. As long as you remember that your search engine optimization training will deliver results only with time, you should be able to have your website back up in Google’s top listings eventually, and stay there until the next new set of rules.
Johan Hedin is the Managing Director of Marketing Ignite.
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