Wednesday, June 24, 2015

SEO Guidelines: Social Is Important, But It Isn’t Everything

Recently, an increasing number of entrepreneurs have been changing their SEO tactics and focusing more on the social media factors to optimize their site for the search engines. It is true that inbound links from social media sites have a far greater hand at SEO than other sites. However, having a one-track strategy for one’s site, simply won’t give them the desired amount of visitors. In other words, social is important, but it isn’t everything.


Now it’s understandable why most people would choose the simple and seemingly ‘effective’ strategy of using social media to optimize their site. But here’s the truth about social media marketing; this is basically effective just for ‘online advertising’ or to put it simply to bring their links and/or products to the notice of users. These platforms have a far greater active usage than others. To optimize a site for search engines, one will have to do a lot more than using social media to constantly post links to their site.

Here are the other factors that determine how successful a site is with search engines:

  • Keyword optimization
  • Proper content
  • Meta-tags
  • Link building
  • Link quality
  • Frequency of new content

Therefore, numerous factors are at play in working towards a site that will do well in an environment of huge competition. Now, here’s why each of these factors is so important to get readers and some SEO guidelines make the best out of these tips.

Keyword Optimization

According to statistics, about 70% of the internet surfing experience begins with keywords being typed into search engines. This probably gives one an idea of how crucial keywords are to get readers. These are, after all, what will bring most users to the site. 




Optimizing a site for keywords involves a few discreet strategies such as generously using keywords and using these in the most strategic places (such as the page header or at the beginning of an article) but avoiding over usage because the search engines might find this malicious. Using keyword analyzers is also very helpful in finding out the best and the most relevant keywords for one’s page, as well as for the purpose of optimizing the page for the target audience.

Proper Content

Here’s an obvious point that doesn’t need much explanation. No matter how much SEO is invested in a site, it can never be successful to get readers if the content is not up to the mark. Quality content is extremely important. Pages with multimedia, especially videos, were observed to generate three times more priorities than the ones with plain text only. Well-written content with plenty of multimedia as well as an appealing layout attract readers and keep them coming.

Meta-tags

Meta-tags or metadata are the ‘invisible’ tags that are visible to the search engines’ bots but not to the users. Therefore, this tool can be very handy when there’s a relevant keyword that doesn’t exactly fit into the page or is difficult to incorporate into the article text. Again, stuffing the page with meta-tags or using a lot of irrelevant ones are against the SEO guidelines of most search engines. Moreover, engaging in illicit activities might get the page suspended, blocked, or fined. Therefore, it is extremely important to use metadata wisely and carefully.

Link-building

Link building is an extremely important factor in SEO, and we can’t stress this enough. Most of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing use algorithms or bots called ‘crawlers’ and ‘spiders’. The crawlers frequently scan or ‘crawl’ the millions of web pages regularly and gather information about them. On the other hand, the ‘spiders’ scan cross-linking between the pages of a site. A greater number of links means a better ranking for a particular page in the search results. Moreover, inbound links from a more popular site has greater weight than other sites. This is the reason why so much importance is given to social media for propagating the page. However, it is NOT everything.

Link quality

In the previous point, there is emphasis on the importance of building links for web pages. Nevertheless, that isn’t the only factor that the spiders consider when deciding a page’s position in the search result rankings. The quality of the links is also very important.

The quality of a particular link is influenced by numerous factors such as the strength of the links, the transmission speed and the site giving inbound links. Usually good quality links involve ones from popular and trusted sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Apart from the popularity and the trustworthiness of the site, relevance of the sites to the page’s content is also important. Therefore, it is necessary to choose a proper web hosting service because this determines how fast and strong the links would be, especially within the domain.


A detailed study of SEO rankings has shown that sites having a blog section have far better rankings than sites that haven’t. This is because the search engines’ crawlers also consider the freshness of the site’s content in determining page relevance. There have been many cases of previously top-ranking search results disappearing from their position due to lack of new content. Establishing a blog section for a site or posting new content regularly is a must-do for a successful site.

For busy small-scale entrepreneurs, blogging or putting up new content may be time consuming and not exactly ‘feasible’. In such cases, applying other updates to the page such as new layouts and links can help to make up for the lack of blog posts.

The social component of SEO isn’t everything when it comes to optimizing a site. Upon closely observing a successful site, one will see that they follow all of the SEO guidelines listed above. One should pay attention to their social media strategies as well. But to make it to the top, a holistic approach is always more successful.



 



Eve Haugen has been a freelance writer for a long while. Her passion in writing is her main drive in crafting articles that are engaging, informative, and meaningful. Her partnership with QuickSEOResults has given her a whole new opportunity to take writing to a whole new level.
 

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