The
beauty of the web is also its worst nightmare for publishers as a
one-person website from a garage, with excellent SEO, sinks its teeth
into your web traffic. Your goal should be to create more unique
visitors to your website than the circulation of your magazine. It is
at this point that publishers begin to see significant revenue from
their web presence online. To that end, you need to create the perfect
SEO plan to drive maximum traffic. There is no more perfect way than
proper SEO.
Let’s
discuss three factors we have found to be most important in regards to
SEO success after optimizing hundreds of web pages for publishers.
First,
site structure in relationship to key search terms. What are users
searching for and then how is your site set up to deliver back relevant
results for those terms. For example, you are a website about parenting
advice. You have optimized your pages for the term, but when a user
gets to the site, do you present your site so that parenting advice is
the menu, the navigation, the section, the pictures, the videos and the
final thought the Google bot remembers when they leave your site? All
in all, you need to follow what Google has said from day one, if you
want great SEO rankings, build a great site that is easy to navigate and
clearly promotes your topic set.
Second,
what are you doing on a monthly basis to create “chatter” for your
website in relationship to your key terms and key phrases? Facebook and
Twitter are not enough to create the “chatter” needed to get you
noticed. “Chatter” is often defined as the overall popularity you have
online. Meaning, how often are people online talking about you, your
magazine and, most importantly, your key terms? The mechanisms to
create effective “chatter” are vast and deep. This type of organic
cheerleading must be an important part of your plan for SEO success and
it must happen daily.
Third,
deep links and the trust factor. We have found deep linking to be vital
to your overall SEO success. Deep links are links to pages on your
site beyond the main page. In this same topic is the search engine
friendly structure of your page names. Creating links from external
sources is great, but creating links to pages deep in your site has been
found to add some serious boost to your efforts especially when the
structure of your page URL incorporates all we have mentioned above in
this article. These deep links will also dramatically affect how the
search engines trust your site. Websites with a ton of deep links from
“trusted” websites almost always fare better in the rankings. There is
no definition for what constitutes a “trusted” web site, but we have
found that other media sites, sites with .org and .edu in their name and
sites that have been online a long time seem to be more trusted than
others
Of
course, we all know there are more than three things you need to do to
be a success with SEO online. But, the first step as a publisher is
often the hardest… realizing that you just might need some help with
SEO. The very best webmasters can often miss some important marks in
shooting towards SEO success. If you do not create the perfect SEO
scenario, someone else will and then they will win the game.
Ready
for an SEO check up? Brain Swell Media offers you a 10 point review in
less than 30 minutes at no cost to you. We will then present you a plan
to fix, grow and make money from your website. Contact us today.
There was a time to sit back and watch for others to win or lose. But,
that time is over. There have been so many real world examples to
follow that publishers need to sit down, get a plan and execute or get
left behind.