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In order for your corporate or personal website to be found by search engines, and ultimately visitors, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of your web strategy.

In this blog post, we’ll review some key components of SEO: content, code/HTML, keywords and link building.

Content

The best website content is readable by search engines (not hidden in images), added often, optimized with keywords, and is organized logically by keyword-based themes or categories. Furthermore, the best website content is reader-friendly – meaning you should optimize your site content for your target audience, making it easy to read and understand.

Code & HTML

When it comes to the architecture of your site, structure your site and navigation based on what’s most important to your visitors. If you know your visitors frequently visit the About Us page on your website, make sure that page is easy to find in your navigation and not buried.

It’s also important to program your site to be crawler-friendly by not hiding important keyword-rich information or links in Flash or JavaScript. Also be sure that any site redirects are 301 (permanent redirect), not 302 (temporary redirect).

Keywords

Website keywords are one of the best tools in optimizing your SEO. Begin by conducting keyword research by compiling competitor sites’ keywords and using the Google Keyword Tool to come up with your list of keywords.

Next you’ll want to prioritize your list of keywords by comparing search volume vs. competitiveness, and the relevance of the keywords to your site content. When it comes time to writing your new web copy, integrate priority phrases into the copy and include keyword phrases in title tags, meta descriptions, page headlines, and text links. However, meta keywords are widely acknowledged to be irrelevant in search algorithms so you don’t necessarily need to use them on your site. You can also integrate your keywords into marketing assets such as press releases, images (alt text, file name), videos (title, file name, description, surrounding content) and PDFs (title, file name).

Link Building

Another tool to enhance your SEO efforts is link building, since search engines take into account how many other websites you link to, and how many link to your website. To a search engine, an incoming link is a vote that your website is reputable and contains valuable content.

Build and maintain online link partnerships with others, such as your customers, your partners, other companies you have a stake in, and communities that you participate in. To earn links, have great content on your website, promote pages on social networks, link up with marketing partners, cross-link internally, embed links internally, and syndicate content via RSS.

SEO Metrics to Monitor

To understand if your SEO efforts are paying off, you’ll want to monitor your SEO metrics on a regular basis. Included below is an introductory list of SEO metrics you may consider monitoring.

Code & HTML
1. Pages indexed
2. Crawling errors
3. Broken links
4. Page speed

Keywords
1. Inquiries
2. Unique visitors
3. Referring sources
4. Referring keywords
5. Keyword ranking

Link building
1. Quality
2. Quantity
3. Longevity

Social media
1. Social media traffic
2. Likes/followers/retweets/shares
3. Social mentions