Search Engine Optimization
A few things I've learned over the years.
SEO is constantly evolving, so staying current is important. When I first learned SEO it used to be about keyword density on a page. As search engines evolved it has become more about writing content that is semantically related to the keywords and phrases you want to rank for and answering the questions and search intent behind the searcher's query.
On-Page SEO
Both the content of the website and the HTML which create the site work together to create the most SEO optimized page. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen a headline on a web page use an <H2> or even an <H3> tag which was visually formatted to look like a headline on the page.
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Technical SEO
Aside from on-page SEO optimization, a site should be evaluated in other areas that help optimize it for crawling and indexing like sitemaps, keyword research, minifying backend coding, JavaScrapt indexing, and meta tags.
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Local SEO
An important aspect of SEO optimization for brick-and-mortar stores, local SEO helps to get your store on the map, almost literally. If I’m searching for “guitar store near me” and your music store doesn’t show up on my search result you might as well be invisible to your potential customers.
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Mobile SEO
On July 1st, 2019, Google enabled mobile-first indexing for all new and previously unknown (to Google) websites. For older sites, they monitor and evaluate pages for mobile readiness. This means that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices it isn’t ranking organically as highly as it can.
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Advanced SEO
Topics like ranking factors split testing, domain migration, natural language processing fall into this category. There are plenty of resources that cover these topics online and each topic deserves more attention than this quick summary page allows.
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E-Commerce SEO
This is a very competitive part of SEO which involves financial transactions, inventory, site architecture, trust issues, and content audits.
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International SEO
Ensuring your site ranks well in countries where you do your business. This involves creating versions of your site in additional languages, ccTLDs which indicate which country a website is based in and hreflang tags which help search engines understand the language and sometimes the region a site belongs to.
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SEO Analytics
You could do all the SEO mentioned above without measuring and reporting on your efforts, but that’s something that goes against my fundamental beliefs about digital marketing and SEO. If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
SEO Copywriting
I have worked with companies that treat their websites like an online salesman espousing how their product is the best and so many people are happy with their product or services. What these sites fail to do is to satisfy their user's search intent. SEO copywriting combines keyword research, on-page SEO, chunking of information (breaking down content into scannable pieces), formatting the page to make it easier to read, and of course how well the content works as part of the conversion funnel.
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