9 SEO Tips: Help Your Website be Discovered

The nature of Search Engine Results has changed considerably in recent years. Google and other search engines tailor results for every visitor based on existing accounts, shadow profiles, sentiment analysis, real-time attention markets and more. All of this means that search results are no longer consistent from one user to another—or even one day to another.

What’s a site owner to do?

Build your site right in the first place.

Your content should have a clear outline and hierarchy of headings delivered by templates built with a meaningful semantic structure. Not all site-builder tools do everything right.

Also be sure your site includes OGP metadata and sharing images. For WordPress sites built at IOP, we leverage The SEO Framework plugin to simplify editing of metadata descriptions and titles, as well as providing recommendations for better performance.

Eight more tips to optimize your site:

  1. Cross-link your site from other properties under your control.
  2. Use clickable link text to create associations to link targets. Linking “your target phrase” implies a strong connection to those words.
  3. Title your pages using key phrases and feature those phrases prominently to reinforce what search engines should know about your site.
  4. Outgoing links to external sites will benefit your search ranking. Search Engines evaluate links in both directions.
  5. Try to increase the number of other sites linking back to you. 
  6. Frequent updates make your site more “interesting” to Search Engines.
  7. Post new articles and update existing content, move pages around. Web sites are living documents and there is no obligation to keep every article online. Removing underperforming content will increase your site’s overall perceived authority.
  8. Periodically link your site from social media posts – but not too much. (This is an indirect boost, increasing brand exposure overall.)

Expectations

We offer these suggestions as best practices based upon our years of experience and real world results, but their ultimate success or failure depends on Google’s (and other search engines) ever-evolving algorithms. Changes will take some time before any effect is seen, and positive effects compound over time. Keep an eye on your analytics.

How Ideas On Purpose can help

Contemplating a website upgrade? Consider engaging an expert. Insight-backed digital communication is integral to the work we do. Check out some of the stakeholder-pleasing sustainability reports and impact communications IOP has created — and email us to get in touch if you need help with yours.  

Photo by Romain HUNEAU on Unsplash