Updated SEO Strategies

Q:  In the event of Google’s search engine recent changes what is the best way to optimize your website for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies?

David Pickette
www.BaysideJewelry.com

A:  Hi David — The basic (standard) rules really haven’t changed much at all in terms of performing SEO on your site.  The recent Google changes were really aimed at demolishing content farms (called the Farmer’s Update) that had a bunch of poorly written, unrelated content on a site.

Here’s what is still working:

1.  Keywords in your domain.  Google seems to be giving a small amount of priority to those sites that have keywords in their domain names.

2.  Don’t forget your page title.  Even if your domain has none of your keywords in it, remember to include your keywords in the titles of your pages.

3.  Leverage your header tags.  Create your page headlines using your H1, H2, or H3 header tags, and make them stand out by bolding them.

4.  Bold your keywords.  Bold the keywords in the content of your page to give them a bit more attention.

5.  Keywords in images.  You can create alt image tags for any images in a page.  This is the text that is displayed if the image doesn’t appear.  Use your keywords in describing your images, as applicable.

6.  Content is king.  You can never go wrong by educating your market about what you do and giving them valuable info to help them solve their problems.  So, as a jeweler, you might want to write about how to care for or store jewelry, or how to determine if your jewelry contains genuine onyx, amethyst, etc.

7.  Stick to your subject.  If you’re a jeweler, don’t digress and post articles on herb gardens or parenting, even though those topics may be of interest to you.  Your jewelry site should exclusively have info related to jewelry, and you would need to find another outlet or create another site for your other interests.

If you follow these 7 simple strategies, you’ll be doing more SEO strategies than 90% of online business owners.