Top 5 ways to enhance your SEO

Plus an additional 10 essentials for SEO

checklist

1. Page/Quality Content

● Know your Customer

● Query Intent: Instead of just using Keyword Research you need to think about

Query Research (What are your clients searching for?)

● Search Engine Providers want to match the most relevant and highest quality

content with a user’s intent at the forefront thus are you satisfying your customer

needs with the content you provide?

● Major companies are continuously spending money and resources in order to build

cognitive computing techniques so that computers may literally think more like us

but are marketers doing the same for their customers?.

● Marketers should spend time and effort to think in the minds of their consumers and

futureproof their thinking, not just for one source of content either, think of your

images. homepages, sub-pages or apps etc.

2. Query Matching

● In addition, these sources will have metadata which is the data that describes the content,

page or app.

● Search engines will crawl through your content, from your web pages, to your apps or

metadata descriptions in an attempt to score your content and whether you are satisfying

your users intent to query. The more satisfying the purpose of your page and content is for

the user, the higher your page will rank in the engines.

● There is different types of intents a user may have such as an action, information or a

navigation intent. Define your purpose as we know that Google wants a page with high

quality content, expert in what they do, trustworthy and has a good reputation.

● Search engines will look for initial signals from areas such as the title, URL or meta

description usually found on the results pages thus it is crucial to optimize these areas to

become an authoritative figure in your field.

● Communicating expertise, authority and trustworthiness across all pages may be difficult

but if you put the time in, you may reap the rewards. User ratings, trustmarks and inbound

links from influential sources will help master your credibility.

3. Maintenance

● Ensure that you have Google Webmaster Tools as it is crucial for your

organisation to be vigilant of the following elements that this tool provides:

- Checking for any penalties, notices or hygiene issues identified by Google

- Checking for Structured Data errors

- Checking for Mobile usability (from a Google perspective)

- Checking page load speeds (not only on homepage but across the website)

- Checking sitemap for timeliness and errors

This tool should be one of first stops when focusing on your SEO techniques as it can tell

you exactly what issues need to be improved upon.

Reputation

● Inbound Links:

Inbound links are really representations of your websites reputation and because you want the

search engine to think your website is high quality, receiving links from influential people in the

industry can signify that you are a reputable and trustworthy website. Lower quality links are a lot

less valuable and in many instances you will be penalised in Google for irrelevant links. A company

should review all inbound links to their website and do a risk assessment on them to be sure of their

quality. Similarly, a company should do same with their main competitors to monitor the type of

influential people that are linking to them which may provide an opportunity for your own

organisation. But more importantly and above all else is to ensure that you have identified any sites

that might attract penalties on your website and cause you to fall down further in the ranks.

● Other forms of a reputable website:

As mentioned previously, user ratings, reviews, testimonials etc are effective ways of expressing

that you have a good reputation on your website or on third party websites that may be linking in.

Ratings can help and show in meta descriptions (or rich snippets) and positively affect the your

search engine position.

5. Action Plan

● Have a clear action plan with a specific checklist of things to do and the

timeframe that's involved. (Checklist may come in handy in following slide)

10 items for your SEO checklist

10. Conduct a full site audit to determine the issues you need to fix (Google Webmaster Tools)

9. Create content for your customers not just the search engines

8. Improve your on page content structure such as headers, titles and URL’s

7. Avoid low quality linking

6. Compose effective engaging titles that incorporate both your keywords for your key user intent

5. Add new content to social bookmarking sites to make the most of your content and reach

4. Use social network sharing options on your website i.e Twitter, Facebook, Google+

3. Remove Duplicated Content

2. Ensure that URL’s contain the keywords that you wish to optimize

1. Consistently add fresh, relevant content to your site

Thank You for watching, why not share the

SEO love around :)

References detailing informative blogs

● What is high quality content and why it matters? | Theo Lynn | LinkedIn.

2015. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-high-

quality-content-why-matters-theo-lynn. [Accessed 28 April 2015]

● Inbound Links & Content: The One Question You Have to Ask | Theo Lynn

| LinkedIn. 2015. [ONLINE] Available at:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inbound-links-content-one-question-you-

have-ask-theo-lynn. [Accessed 28 April 2015].

● 10 Simple Ways To Quickly Improve SEO Rankings [Infographic]. 2015.

[ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/10-simple-

ways-to-quickly-improve-seo-rankings-infographic/. [Accessed 28 April

2015]