There sure are a lot of suggestions when it comes to optimizing a website for search engines. In the past month alone, for example, Bing has said exact match domains don't influence position in website ranking, and Google has said the tactic of guest blogging is done.
Couple these recent declarations with the vast existing maze of guidance that confounds struggling digital enterprises and confuses already established companies, and it makes a white hat wearing SEO with good intentions wonder what's left to do. The answer is simple - just aim for a different target: being popular. So, how you can you do that on the 'Net today and more importantly, stay that way far into the future?
Optimization comes in several different varieties - optimization of the user experience, optimization of the page for relevancy and optimization of both personal and digital relationships. And, you need all three working in near-perfect harmony to get on the SERPs in competitive positions. In order to optimize a website's popularity, consider the following time-tested approaches to gaining popularity from the search results. You should know that the following guidance isn't a shortcut. Rather, today, you should decide to take the long way in pursuit of SEO success for your enterprise:
Optimize the User Experience: Perhaps the most straightforward of all the SEO practices, optimizing the user experience demands making the website better in general by way of improving its usefulness and intuitiveness - from functional and helpful navigation to reducing technical barriers. It needn't be an overly exhaustive effort, however, as there are eventually diminishing returns from these type of initiatives. You should, however, identify page load time benchmarks and commit to improving them over time - eliminating bottlenecks and third-party functionality, which interferes with the user experience (and their potential recommendation of your website/company). Consider analyzing eye tracking and heat map reports to understand how users experience a site, and conduct your own conversion on the site to understand, in a qualitative way, how users are completing the outlined objectives.
Optimize the Page for Relevancy: The most basic of the SEO optimization practices, optimizing the relevancy of a page requires an understanding of the user's needs - nothing more, nothing less. While no SEO has access to the keywords currently used by consumers for finding websites and ultimately visiting, what can be done by Internet professionals is to develop profiles of these potential/prospective visitors by building out detailed demographic and psychographic information that enables your enterprise to create resources that help those users satisfy the reason for visiting your website in the first place. When your website is relevant to many user queries simultaneously, you're positioned for long-term SEO success. The only way to do that is to develop a more intimate understanding of your users.
Optimize Link Relationships: Without question, the most valuable practice for those involved in search engine optimization, the relationships a brand has with other entities (from independent review sites and information publishers to local directories and established offline media) is their most important asset. Link building is not an SEO function, but rather a business function, something that should be ingrained within every process of the enterprise - from customer support to content marketing to advertising. In essence, everyone should be involved in the link building process and from the very beginning.
Keep these three requirements in mind, and you too, can be popular in search - if not forever, then at least for a little while.
