A New Year Means New SEO
I see so many site owners make the mistake of thinking that SEO is a “set it and forget it” medium. Just like any other marketing campaign you may undertake this year, SEO is something that can’t just put on the back burner and expect to run itself. No, you don’t need to be re-optimizing your website every three months, but there is so much more to SEO than just the onsite process! Now that we are into the New Year (and everyone is back to the grindstone) it’s time to start thinking about a new (and improved) SEO campaign.
What new SEO action items can you do in 2013 to take your SEO to the next level?
1. Revisit your keyword research.
I usually tell my clients they should consider revamping their website (new design, new content, etc.) every two years or so (if it makes sense). You want to clean up your website—weed out underperforming pages, tighten up your internal linking and navigation and consider revisiting your keyword research as part of your new SEO campaign. How has user search behavior changed since the last time you optimized your website? What new industry keywords are popping up? What terminology is going out of style? The keywords you target are the cornerstone of your SEO campaign and it’s important to make sure they are still on track. Sometimes you might only have to swap out a few keywords (maybe none). Other times a whole new world of keywords will have cropped up in the last few years and you’re missing valuable visitors by not targeting them on your website.
2. Ramp up your content marketing.
It’s hard to have a good guest blogging program when you can’t get your own blog under control. Now that you’ve had a year or two to fine tune your blogging skills on your own company blog it’s time to ramp up your content marketing efforts for your new SEO campaign and look into getting real guest blogging opportunities on respected industry sites. I worry that guest blogging will become the new link exchange and Google will start treating them as such, so it’s important that you don’t publish content on any old site that will have you. Take the time to find quality blogs that reach your target audience and routinely produce great content—these are the blogs you want to be writing for.
You could also ramp up the content creation on your own blog by accepting a few guests posts of your own (maybe 2 or so a month) or start interviewing industry experts and publishing those interviews as blog posts. A guest blogger or expert is going to want to promote content with their name attached to it, but it’s your blog that reaps the link building and traffic driving benefits! But remember, just like you don’t want to publish on any old blog, you don’t want any old blogger publishing on your site. Pick and choose carefully!
3. Start going after those hard-to-get links.
A new SEO campaign is the perfect opportunity to push your white hat link building to greater heights. Start going after that hard to win links that you might have avoided in the past and make your link profile that much stronger! I know it can be frustrating to feel like you’re spending hours building links and only having a handful of published links to show for it but those hard to get links are going to be much more valuable in the long run than a dozen easy wins.
Categorized in: SEO
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