Search engine optimisation is incredibly complex. There are so many strategies, techniques and tactics that can be employed to help organically improve a businesses search engine visibility that it can be easy to forget some of the basic principles that are equally as essential.  In this blog I’ll discuss a few of those basic principles that often act as the foundation of an SEO strategy and if neglected could potentially slow the rate of growth that search engine optimisation can achieve. As with most web strategy related concepts, the place to start is with content.

Prepare a Content Strategy

Content is now considered to be one of the most important elements in an SEO strategy. It serves multiple purposes; to win links, to build brand awareness, to attract the search engines to index more often and to strengthen a social media marketing strategy. Before engaging in an in-depth and demanding SEO campaign it is worth ensuring that a scalable content strategy is drafted and fresh material is constantly being produced to engage with your audience.

This doesn’t mean having a vast emporium of Google-worthy content safely stored in some secure hard drive, but it means conducting research into the seasonal search trends of your industry and what other content qualifies as link worthy, and preparing to be ready to address those seasonal trends.

Every piece of content you create needs to be link-worthy, and for this to work you need to be researching and studying what kind of content your competitors are producing, how they are marketing it and doing it better than them.

Manage your Websites Architecture

For the majority of cases, the websites that are most effectively optimised for search engine indexation will have a flat architecture. This simply means that the search engine spiders will have as little distance to travel as possible to the deepest page of content because, basically, it minimises the chance of them encountering a ‘spider trap’.

Create basic URL sitemaps and analyse the taxonomy of your site; keep an eye out for any discrepancies that could potentially stop Google-bot crawling all your pages when it comes to visit. If you quickly establish a solid architecture for your site, it will make future expansions and growth much more manageable.

Get Social

Social media marketing is an unavoidable aspect of modern search marketing strategies. There is incredible scope to use it as a free advertising tool and share content, advertise products or run competitions with vast swathes of people. In the same way that a content strategy is devised to respond to seasonal search trends and industry events, a social strategy must follow the same principles. React to the desires of your followers by adopting a topical SMO strategy – Use LinkedIn for any B2B activity, use Twitter to keep followers updated on business activity and use Facebook to publish pictures and more detailed accounts of this activity. A social media presence requires a lot of time and effort, and having a strategy in place can help businesses prepare for this.

Know how to build links

It remains a fact that link building is conducive to improving search engine visibility. Google considers websites with a diverse and authoritative link profile to be highly relevant and good quality and are therefore more likely to rank those websites highly. The best way to prepare a link building strategy is to conduct some basic competitor research and find out where they are getting there links. Use this information to prepare your own strategy, but be ready to go and find other links that competitors haven’t yet sourced as this might be necessary to outrank them.

Often link building strategies are connected to content strategies because to acquire links a website needs to be consistently producing link worthy material. A basic link building strategy at the beginning of an SEO strategy will be highly beneficial when a business starts to grow and expand as their online visibility increases.

Why are these SEO basics so important?

These SEO basics are so important because they act as the foundation that more technical and large-scale optimisation techniques are based on when future growth dictates that a strategy needs to expand. Without these fundamentals in place it could be easy to damage the early SEO work that has been done for a website. If you can perfect these simple suggestions I have made, then it makes future success in the search engines much more attainable.

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