SEO Best Practices

In continuation with my earlier post, from among the various SEO strategies that one needs to follow, the following still holds a lot of importance -

1. Links – Getting links from authoritative sites and linking back to sites that may be of interest to your visitors.

2. Likes- In the social networking language, getting likes for your posts is really great. Focus on good content and share in your circle and see the likes multiply.

3. Follow – Getting followers for your blog, Twitter updates is very important today. The more people that follow your posts that more visibility for your blogs.

Since search results are becoming very comprehensive, meaning; you will find that the SERPs provides you results from their index, from Twitter,  Facebook, Ezine, Youtube, the results are increasingly becoming very-very relevant. Isn’t it time that we invest time on networking and the other channels of information on the internet so that we are visible everywhere.

In summary, going forward into 2012, we will need to focus upon Social networking along with SEO strategies, we need to get this mix right in order to get popularity and visibility in 2012.

What are the likely changes in the SEO practices in 2012?

There are some best practices that will not change at all. Especially, I do not see the SEO basics changing at all.

What will really change and is changing in a big way is the SEO mix. The composition is changing and gravitating more and more towards Social networking.

Meaning: when chalking out SEO work for your website make sure Social networking makes for a huge chunk of the pie. Networking sites enjoy a lot of traffic. If you have a circle of friends that you are connected to, the best means gaining visibility for your website is by making it part of your profile. Sharing updates etc. The best part is the viral nature of this channel. Through your circle of friends, you will get more friends and so on. Imagine the potential!

For instance on Facebook, you can “write a note” and publish it for your friends to read and share. It is a great way of sharing information. If you have a blog, you should make sure your blog updates show up on the Facebook notes, you can easily do so by importing your blog feeds. If you do not have a page for your business on Facebook, it may be worthwhile to create a page and send requests to your friends.SEO optimize the page just like any other page and watch the traffic grow.

More and more people are using the networking sites and it is therefore a good idea to have them as part of your SEO plan. People are looking beyond search engines for answers, what can be better than gaining visibility while catching up with your friends.

This year I see more and more people using social networking sites to connect, to share, and to promote. Although this means a shift in the SEO strategy for more businesses, it does not however minimize the importance of SEO. Optimization thy name is SEO.

Optimizing content for SEO across all channels should be the plan, it could be on Facebook or PR sites or blogs or anything. Anything that can be searched can be optimized.

The SEO mantra for 2012 is to be visible across all the channels and especially channels that are being frequented by your target audience. Go with the flow and ensure that your presence is felt!

Let us go SEOnetworking this 2012.

I have found that the best practice for optimizing your website for visitors and search engines is to do some live testing.

You could ask your friends or even your customers to go through your website and let you know their feedback. If you have been involved in the website designing process, you may find that it is pretty easy to navigate your site because you know every nook and corner. But you won’t be the end user, therefore the need for testing by a subset of your target customers will help tremendously.

You might be surprised with the outcome. What you considered an easy process might actually be complicated for many. Some might not even find the links that you want them to click; some may find that your website take ages to load. Not everyone has access to the fastest internet connectivity.

And then some technologies do not work the same way on all browsers.

That’s why, the best way is to ask someone to go to your website and perform the tasks that you want your potential customers to perform on your web site. It could be subscribing to your newsletter or purchase something or anything that you wish for a visitor to do, depending upon your objective.

You could be a silent spectator and watch the test team navigate your site or you could get their feedback after they are done testing your site. You can unfold small little things that are apparently small but applying them to your web site will increase the chances of visitors staying at your website longer, and performing tasks that you want them to perform.

In summary, testing will ensure that your website is ready for human visitors. It is important that you listen to and collect perspectives and observations from a sample of population.

From a visitor’s perspective, it is best to learn to search with keywords that will bring up the most relevant site in a jiffy. From the webmaster’s perspective, it is ideal if their site comes up on the top of the search engine results page whenever a searcher searches with relevant keywords.

This is the most desirable result.

However, this is not easily achievable. There is no specific method or process to solve this or to arrive at a solution, it is a practice. Just uploading fresh content often will not ensure decent rankings, and neither will incoming links from hundreds of sites. To some extent these may help, if these links are from relevant, authoritative sites.

The whole online promotions and Search engine optimization process is very dynamic.I never get tired of saying that.And it is true.

For instance, you may find that a site, probably with content that was updated five months back, ranking very high on search engines. So, it is definitely not content that is of always weighed heavily, it is important but at the end of the day, I think what is important is how popular your site is even when there is not much of fresh content being uploaded. It is essential that the site has enough material to pull visitors all the time. Of course, it does not mean that a site that does not update content very often has stopped promoting the site.You will find that these sites have links across good authoritative sites and are well represented on social networking sites as well.

The point I am making here is that there is a need for continuous online promotions and an online strategy that matches the current search requirement. A Webmaster needs to apply all of this in order to increase the visitors or traffic to the site. It is important that your site is well represented across all channels online. If you cannot add fresh content to your site on a regular basis, what you could do is ensure that you participate in forum discussions, twit about your business and participate. Also, try to get links from good authoritative sites, this will help because more people will know about your site and some will definitely drop in. Just make your presence felt, participate and help others.

In order to be in sync with your visitors, it is best to find out their favourite haunts and befriend them, help them and that will be the beginning of a relationship that can last forever. The more you talk to them the more you will find what they, what they are searching for. This is very valuable as it will help in fine tuning your site to your visitors needs.

Out of sight, out of mind. This is a webmaster’s nightmare. Do not let it happen to your sites. Keep the channels of communication open. Keep up the visibility at all times.