Part 2: Eight back to basics for SEO
Google Search Center provides a comprehensive starter guide for those searching to learn more about SEO. For companies and their marketing professionals who are searching to add SEO to their digital strategies, this could be a great resource for the website design and development team as well.
The thing with SEO is that not only does the marketing team need to be on-board with this marketing strategy, but the website development team also needs to understand the importance of adding SEO and the right basics on the back-end of the website.
As the fundamentals continue to stay the same throughout the duration of their life, with minor changes here and there to accommodate for the latest technology, before you can run with the new technology changes, make sure you understand the basics.
Our Denver SEO firm explains the last four out of the eight SEO basics that every marketer, SEO expert, rookie or developer should understand to create the leading SEO strategy.
1. Meta descriptions
The meta description is the small 30-60 characters underneath the URL that tells search engines and searchers what the page is about. This can influence organic and paid click-through rates, but recently Google was accused of changing meta descriptions.
Even other times in search engines, this is being skipped over, which means rewriting the meta description and manipulating the character count.
A study from Ahrefs showed that 63 percent of this content is being skipped over and Google is taking the content from the first paragraph and implementing that into the meta description.
This doesn’t mean that SEO marketing experts, marketers and companies should skip the basics of meta description because this isn’t something that is happening constantly. Our suggestion is to continue to implement meta descriptions and make sure the first 60 characters of your blog, product or service page is amazing.
2. Optimized pages
While this is an old school method, it ties into the point above, make sure to add keywords and optimized content in the first 100 words. This can be long-tail or short-tail keywords, but this puts more emphasis on those keywords when Google is crawling pages.
Just make sure not to keyword stuff. This is another old school tactic, but it has been banned in the SEO industry, this is because Google prefers content that is written for consumers first and SEO second.
Think about it, if there are 10 keywords throughout an entire article and it is just overwhelming, consumers and search engines alike will turn away.
There is nothing wrong with using a couple of keywords a couple of times, but don’t over do it.
3. Accessibility
While this is something that has recently been a discussion for companies, in all reality, this should have been a big part of SEO. There are one in four Americans who have a disability. This includes physical and mental disabilities, but these Americans utilize technology that provides them with the ability to search the internet.
This not only helps those with disabilities search through the internet and your website, at the same time, it helps with mobile search and experience. And in return, this helps to increase users who stay on your website.
4. User Experience
As this video explains in more detail, User Experience (UX) design is all about designing, developing and creating those moments that provide a satisfying experience for each customer on the website.
This experience provides no fuss, confusion and provides simplicity at its finest. What does this have to do with SEO strategies? This is because a company with an old website that does not have UX design at the forefront will struggle with ranking in search engines, especially Google.
Any Denver SEO firm will explain that with the Google Page Experience update coming this year, this is one of the factors that HAS to be updated to rank in their search engine. Without this design and development element, a website will slowly start to notice its rankings going down.
There are the final four of the eight back to basics for SEO! Remember, read part one for the first steps in the SEO strategy, and then head back to this blog! If you are here and have a pretty basic understanding of all of this, forget blog one!
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