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Extending your SEO

Many websites use WordPress, and if your company is we recommend installing the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. This plugin does an outstanding job helping you remember all the key points of SEO by giving you detailed alerts and an overall page SEO rating for each page. For example another key component to successful SEO are links both outbound and internal. The Yoast plugin will remind you to add links to your content if you’ve forgotten. Links help improve the overall quality of your content by lending credibility, and helping readers know where to find further information on the subject at hand. Google is very open about its commitment to ranking high quality content, and when your company provides it your content will rank better.

Another reminder that the SEO plugin will give you is to include images in your content. Images provide visual breaks for your reader making your content more readable. There are also more opportunities for your keyword placement in the alt, title and description. Google also provides image search where your images will be indexed. Google image search provides another channel for search traffic to your site.

The Plugin will also remind you to fill out your meta description, and will provide a text entry box for you to do so. Here is yet another opportunity to use your keyword, and supportive keywords. Where possible place your keyword as early in the meta description as possible. If you’re considering meta keywords don’t. Given the amount of abuse this property saw early on search engines ignore them, and so should you.

Social and Google Authorship: The Basics Plus

Google uses over 200 factors when considering how to rank content, and 1 of them is social signals. We don’t know exactly what these social signals are, but there is evidence to suggest that comments, +1s and reshares of your content on Google+ are seen as positive social signals which will improve overall ranking. Also keep in mind that YouTube is social, and comments on your videos are seen as positive social signals as well. For local SEO reviews are very important, and highly weighted by Google.

Google has an Authorship program where authors are officially connected with the content they produce through a Google+ profile. There is a lot of debate over whether Google is actively ranking content produced by high authority authors, but Google has openly said that this is not the case. Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Authorship is not a ranking signal in this Webmaster Central video from late September 2013.

There are a lot of indications that Google would like to become better at understanding authority, and then begin to rank content accordingly. Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that Google is getting better at understanding authority, and will continue to do so. However there are current benefits to authorship. For one you are future proofing your search rankings, and building an Authorship history on which to stake your authority reputation. For another, and more immediate benefit, your search results will appear with your image next to them. Studies have proven that links with images next to them receive more clicks than those without.

In conclusion the best SEO advice given by the experts time and time again is to produce high quality content. We wrote a blog post, Content Marketing for Small Business, on using high quality consistent content to drive traffic, and increase search rankings. Google has made it clear in its Webmaster Tools Ranking article, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.” Put your users experience first, and your SEO will be on the right track.