SEO Best Practices cont…

If you read part one of this two-part series, you read that the first three critical pieces of SEO are: 1) For you to narrow your focus, 2) match your copy with your SEO, and 3) make your SEO Twitter perfect. This means that instead of casting a wide net over a large audience, you are honing in on your specific audience and concentrating on who they are and what they need. It also means your SEO is reflective of your copy, which makes it so much more searchable. And lastly, it means that it’s Twitter perfect, perfectly readable across every search engine. As you do this, you will notice your site popping higher and higher, week after week. Today, we want to give you two more best practices for your SEO.

Use key phrases in addition to keywords. You know that in the SEO world, that you need to use keywords in order to make someone’s search terms result in your site. However, people are using more than just words in today’s search world, they are using key phrases. Key phrases are combined terms like “good neighborhood parks” and “church near the freeway”. While keywords can make your site rank high, the right key phrases will allow you to rank the highest. Therefore, do some quality research and know what your audience is looking for, and enter it into your SEO meta data.

Always run a mobile-responsive website. As a design firm, we knew that Google “mobilegeddon” would be huge, but did you notice a large portion of the web go dark? It did, and our friends at Yoast wrote about it extensively in regards to what happens when you don’t have a mobile responsive site or don’t react fast enough to the drop in your rank. Almost 50% of non-responsive websites dropped off the map, while 30% of responsive sites jumped up in searches [study]. This begs the question: are you running a mobile-responsive website? If not, then you are dropping lower and lower every day. This is no longer a Google threat, but a present day web reality that will never go away. Because 97% of the population is using handheld devices for the majority of their web searches, a mobile responsive website just needs to happen. Therefore, put away the mobile-version of your website; it doesn’t work. Restart with a fresh mobile-responsive website and recover what you lost, and have a sustainable website for years to come.

Does your SEO follow our five best practices? If not, we can help.