It should be clear to anyone with more than a passing interest in search engine optimization that it favors long-term planning and hard work over easy, short-term gain. If you need any proof of this, you need look no further than last year’s Penguin 2.0 update and how hard it hit websites that used questionable (yet effective) optimization techniques like paid links, content networks, and link schemes. What’s one thing all those strategies shared in common?
They were easy. They required minimal work on the part of the webmaster and gave immediate returns.
If you really want to see a return on search engine optimization, you can’t take the easy route. You’re going to need to set out with a firm knowledge of how SEO works. You’re going to need to work hard, pay attention, and always be vigilant. Most of all, you’re going to need to devise a long-term SEO strategy, one which will stand the test of time.
Here are a few tips to get you started.
Get Your Goals Straight
The first question you need to ask yourself when devising your strategy is what your goals are. To that end, there are several things you need to consider:
- How do you make money, and what role is your website going to play in this?
- What is your target audience? How will you draw them in?
- How important is constant engagement? Are your customers infrequent and ephemeral, or do they tend to stick with you for life?
- What specific actions do you want visitors to your site to take? Do you, for example, want them to purchase products from Amazon based on your recommendations? Do you want them to subscribe to a newsletter or service, or do you simply want them to click through?
From this, you need to lay down a solid goal (or set of goals) for both the short-term and long-term and stick to them.
Dive Into Content Marketing
Particularly with the push Google’s made towards content as a means of determining a page’s ranking, content marketing is one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. As such, it should factor heavily into your long-term strategy. Although it’s no simple task, you need to create great content for your site – the sort of stuff people are going to willingly share and talk about.
The reason for this is simple: where most traditional SEO tactics are inarguably short term, high quality and high-value content can send you targeted traffic for years through referrals, social networks, and word of mouth. All the usual tips for creating great content apply here, of course: make sure it’s original and useful, know your demographic, create geo-targeted landing pages and content (if possible) and be a stickler for quality. Another good tip is to consider bringing on well-known content creators to write guest posts for your page, if you’ve the funds for it.
Above all else, focus on providing a positive user experience.
Optimize Social Media And Get Involved With The Community
It’s no coincidence that whenever we hear talk of a long-term SEO strategy, social media inevitably comes up. That’s because these days, a strong social presence is invaluable to a website’s success, particularly with the strong role it plays in content marketing. With that in mind, you need to be active – both on your own website and on social media. Which sites you target in this regard depends entirely on your audience, but in all cases, you need to approach this as a member of the community more than a marketer.
Set out with a goal of getting to know the sorts of people you’re going to be writing for, and wherever possible, interact with them in positive ways.
If you offer any products or services, hand out the occasional freebie or discount. Host a competition or two, if you like(but be aware of the rules if you’re running through Facebook). Last, but certainly not least, don’t discount non-competing individuals or organizations hailing from the same field as you. Establishing a working relationship with them sets you up with an extremely powerful means of driving traffic to your site.
Leverage Google Authorship
Google Authorship enables the site to track an author’s online writing, determining the topics on which that author is an authority. From there, it can gauge the quality of content the author generally produces. Although this doesn’t really factor into page rankings yet, it’s highly likely that it will in the future – as such, it should go without saying that any long-term SEO strategy should make use of authorship in some way.
Leveraging it for your website is fairly simple – look for guest contributors who’ve established large online writing portfolios for themselves, and have them activate authorship (if they haven’t already done so). The better-known the writer, the better the content you’ll receive.
You can read more about Authorship here.
Review What You’re Doing
Like any long-term strategy, you need to step back and occasionally review what you’re doing in order to ensure you’re sticking to your goals. Run regular A/B tests on your pages to test out your designs. Lay out a set of parameters (such as conversion rate or increase in traffic) and keep a close eye on them, tweaking your strategy as needed whenever you notice you aren’t meeting your projections.
In terms of frequency, I’d watch the metrics daily, with monthly or bi-monthly meetings where you can address anything that isn’t going as planned.
Build To Last
The most important piece of advice I can give you about your optimization strategy is that you should never really stop creating it. The field of search engine optimization is notoriously mercurial, and the tactics and techniques which seem tried-and-true today might be considered obsolete a year from now. Build your strategy to last, and understand that no plan survives first contact with reality. Be prepared to put in a lot of hard work, and keep abreast of all the changes – past, present, and future – in website optimization.
Being able to paint a more complete picture of the optimization landscape will allow you to more easily develop – and adapt – a strategy which will stick with you for years to come. In short…keep an eye on the present, but always plan for the future. Otherwise, you risk leaving your website in the dust of its competitors.
Image: Flickr/epSos