9 SEO Tips: What We Recommend to Help Your Website be Discovered

The nature of Search Engine Results has changed considerably in recent years. Google and other search engines tailor results for every visitor based on existing accounts, shadow profiles, sentiment analysis, real-time attention markets and more. AI makes it all harder. Google moves the goalposts. Reputation matters more. All of this means that search results are no longer consistent from one user to another—or even one day to another.

What’s a site owner to do?

Build your site right in the first place.

Your content should have a clear outline and hierarchy of tagged headings delivered by templates built with a meaningful semantic structure. Not all site-builder tools do everything right.

Also be sure your site includes OGP metadata and sharing images. For WordPress sites built at IOP, we leverage The SEO Framework plugin to simplify editing of metadata descriptions and titles, as well as providing recommendations for better performance.

Nine more tips to optimize your site:

  1. Cross-link and mention your brand and site from other properties under your control. Even social media links can help, though don’t over-do it. To keep ahead of AI it’s not only the links, but also the sum total of information online about you and your brand.
  2. Use clickable link text to create associations to link targets. Linking “your target phrase” implies a strong connection to those words.
  3. Title your pages using key phrases and feature those phrases prominently to reinforce what search engines should know about your site. Optimize URL structures, image alt tags, and internal linking to improve crawlability and indexability.
  4. Outgoing links to external sites that are also authoritative will benefit your search ranking. Search Engines evaluate links in both directions.
  5. Try to increase the number of other sites linking back to you. They should be high-quality inbound links from reputable and relevant websites in your industry.
  6. Frequent updates make your site more “interesting” to Search Engines. Optimize the page content so that your key subjects and phrases are naturally incorporated.
  7. Post new articles and update existing content, move pages around. But keep quality writing in mind. Web sites are living documents and there is no obligation to keep every article online.
  8. The long tail is still important. Even if content is old, if it is useful and well visited, it builds your expertise and authority. Keep it. Update it. Remove underperforming content (or rewrite it) to increase your site’s overall perceived authority.
  9. Pay attention to your overall reputation. SEO can be a “dark art” and there is really no magic. Think about the full picture of your brand and your presence online, from all angles. So even though you want to optimize your website, it is really optimizing your overall online presence.

Expectations

We offer these suggestions as best practices based upon our years of experience and real world results, but ultimate success depends on Google’s (and other search engines) ever-evolving algorithms. Changes take time to create an effect, and positive effects compound over time. Keep an eye on your analytics.

No quick fixes here… as the web evolves and AI is “entangled in everything” you need to think holistically about your overall presence, it all contributes to your brand authority and your sites ranking. How you appear on LinkedIn and other social media, how key personnel represent the company online, affiliated brands and more can help or hinder you organizational site’s visibility.

Ideas On Purpose can help

Contemplating a website upgrade? Consider engaging an expert. Insight-backed digital communication is integral to the what we do. Check out some of the stakeholder-pleasing sustainability reports and branded impact communications as well as websites IOP has created—and email us to get in touch if you need help with yours.  

Photo by Romain HUNEAU on Unsplash
updated 4/2024