How to Win At SEO
A big part of my job is defining the product roadmap with work that improves our visibility (read: ranking) in search engines. Growing natural, organic visitors through SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is the key to improving the margins and value of your web business.
Here is my short and sweet take at winning at SEO:
1. Have an incredible product or content that people CHOOSE link to you. Links are the economy of the web and the more people that link to you, the higher your reputation, and the stronger Search Engines will rank to you. If you were to do 1 thing, do this.
2. Write Unique, Great Content, that uses Headlines and Titles that match the top keywords (using https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) in your given category.
3. Write ALOT of Great Content
4. Get your Users to Write ALOT of Great Content - message boards, blogs
5. Keep It Clean — as in your HTML markup! Keep every page crisp, clean, without unneccessary code, images, css, and database calls. The snappier every page loads, the more Googlebot/Spiders visiting your site will have time to visit every page that you created on #3, #4. This is really important - Googlebot only wants to spend X hours on your site a day, so you want it to scan as much as possible, and discover your new Great Content!
6. Navigation is a Tree - think about making a decision. The easiest way to get to your answer is through a tree of questions, right? At each step, you’re only presented with the questions pertinent at that step. Navigation should be the same. You don’t need a link to EVERY article from every page - only the articles that are pertinent to that subject matter. This way, both users — and Google — continue down clear, content-relevent paths as they discover new content. Just make it easy to go backwards in the Tree, or jump to other parts of the Tree!
All of the above is easier said than done. That being said, in my favorite rapper Biggie’s words, “Follow these rules you’ll have mad bread to break up”. Any other quick-hitting tips, shoot em in the comment box.
