Top 5 SEO Activities for 2014

Written by: Gary Horsman

Top 5 SEO Activities for Early 2014

It’s Wise to Mesh with the Search Engines

The search engines are always trying to deliver better results for their audience (the searching public). This is good news for website owners that want to create more content that is meaningful to people searching for their products or services. It is important for anyone who desires to be presented by search engines to produce meaningful and search engine optimized content.

Here are my top 5 search engine optimization and content-creating activities to start off the year practicing in 2014.                  

Increase Site Size & Site Content

In many independent tests, experiments and observations a larger site with more specific content out-performs smaller less specific websites. To move ahead of your competition in 2014 consider the level of content you now have on your site and whether you can reorganize it and create specific content pieces to rank better in search and improve your conversion rate.

Also the major search engines are also putting more emphasis on the internal linking structure of your website and blog. Therefore, consider how to cross link your content and if you are blogging then use links in each blog post to link to key content-specific pages on your website. 

Here is a full set of Content Marketing Tutorials that provides more guidance.

Meaningful content properly linked will help your search position.

Target Long Tail Keyword with Content

To target long tail keywords can help your search position, your traffic levels and your conversion rate. Remember you need all three items to be successful.

Search position without traffic provides little benefit to a business and traffic without conversion is meaningless unless all you care about is advertising and you make your money by impressions.

Build Off-Site Links

To gain links from external relevant website provides traffic and can help conversion. Note that a link from another website is a referral from that website. Referrals are very worthy sources of traffic

You may also want to consider long-tail based Landing Pages to help with your optimization efforts and your conversion rate. A well designed landing page will also support gaining in-coming links.

Watch Your Usage Stats and Make Adjustments

From Google Analytics

To do well in search you have to provide an excellent user experience. To gain conversions you need to also provide an excellent user experience.

Therefore, pay close attention to your site traffic monitoring. If you have a high bounce rate or a low time on site then do something about it. Think about what you can do to increase the number of page views.

If your site or your server is slow then you may have great content but the search engines may not display it high in the search results because they know that a slow site does not provide a good user experience.

Study your traffic and use your webmaster tools account to improve and fine-tune your website and blog. 

Monitor your site traffic and do something to make improvements!

Click here to learn more about A/B Testing as this could be a great activity for you in early 2014 to help lower bounce rate and increase your conversion rate.

Use Social Sharing and Establish Your Authorship

If you create delightful content based on specific long-tail keyword phrases and make sure the user experience is good (or better than good) then you will naturally produce more social sharing. This is great for business as this sharing also generates referrals.

People like to share what they find valuable, informative or entertaining. Promote the sharing by creating valuable and delightful content. Produce content worth sharing!

Also, the major search engines and Google in particular will be paying more attention to authorship and if your content is shared via social networks then this boosts up your author rating. Become known as a content creator that provides valuable, insightful and entertaining content that is shared by others.

Remember that using Social Media to drive traffic to your center of content is a wise and fruitful business activity. Here is a blog post that emphasizes a good way to mesh Content Marketing with Social Media.