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SEO Part 4: Thinking outside your site

By Francesca Firth on Mon 03 March 2014 in Web & eCommerce

The last in our series of SEO best practice articles... 

Social
If someone interacts with you through social media it indicates to google that you are a real site, creating good quality content. Aside from this, it gives you a great opportunity to interact with your customers showing that you are a brand with personality and great customer service. Building a network to spread your content is important, there are hundreds of stats out there that prove this. Spending a small amount of your time building your social network could have a huge impact on your company’s revenue.

There are thousands of sites out there to share content on. The usual Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are great, but your business should look into other content sharing sites such as Slide Share, Klout, Visually and Pinterest.

Backlinking
In the past, the number of pages linking to your website always had a positive effect on your SEO. Now, however, search engines are realising that quantity does not always mean quality.  “Black Hat” SEO practices were adopted by some sites to increase the number of links to their site. These are now being penalised by google. Links to your site should indicate a level of authority and share-ability of your content. Google now looks at the quality of each link. Too many links from untrustworthy sources will have a negative impact on your SEO.

The best way to increase the number of high quality links to your website is through asking permission. If you like a sites content, link to it and in return ask if they can link back to you. This tells Google you can be trusted as an authority and they will move you further up their rankings.

The simple guide

This simple guide to SEO may not seem so simple any more, there is a lot to consider when trying to get the optimisation right. The most important thing to remember is that your website is written for humans. Search engines are increasingly trying to think like humans so this does give you an advantage when creating web content. Your key considerations when creating an SEO strategy should be:

Your Audience– Who are you creating this site for? What do they want from your site? How will they find it?
Your Content- Does your content tell your audience everything that it needs to? Will they enjoy reading your content?
Your Reputation– Will your target audience want to share your content? Do the right sort of sites link to your site?

Search engines, like any site, operate in a competitive environment and in order to remain competitive they will need to give their target audience what they want- good quality search results. By making sure that your site is well designed and well written you can ensure that your site is highly visible to search engines and customers alike.

We have developed a step-by-step how to guide for ProspectSoft CMS users which explains more aspects of SEO and the ways in which our solution can facilitate SEO enhancement. Call us to receive a copy.