SEO

One thing that anyone can do to improve SEO on their website is begin a program of regular blogging.

I am an San Antonio SEO expert and have done search engine optimization for some of the busiest websites in town. Good SEO in a competitive environment can be very time consuming an expensive. One thing that I always press hard with clients is that we will cross the finish line faster as a team. Yes, I can write great content and I am very familiar with the dental field and several other health fields as well. But somehow it works so much better if the owner of a practice writes the blog or at least contributes on a regular basis.

You can get a fantastic mix of great content that is specifically relevant to that practice (or business). And if you have no budget at all, and have decided not to hire a fancy SEO expert like myself, well then blogging becomes incredibly important. You can’t do all the technical wizardry but you can do the very foundation that all good ranking is built on – create unique on a regular basis and keep pumping it out on a steady schedule.

Steady Blogging Will Improve SEO Better Than Irregular

My experience is that you get a much better result doing a short post each Monday morning than doing four longer ones at the end of the month. Not to mention that it is so much easier to keep up a steady schedule if you have a set time to get it done by. We are all busy professionals, so setting a specific time to public makes it easier. Of course the fact that I build all my websites in wordpress and that it has an option to schedule when you post will publish helps too.

Search engine optimization and the state of your website is being judged by machines, not people. Machines can easily judge things like frequency of content. I learned a lot of what I know from a true pioneer in the field of SEO – a man who was doing search engine optimization before the words were invented. He taught me this trick and I have seen it keep working all the way up till today. Blog at a steady pace. Once a day is better than once a week. Once a week is better than once a month. But however you blog, keep it consistent. Publish every morning at 9am, or every Monday at 5pm. But make sure you publish on a steady schedule. 

Blogging is a huge point to improve SEO and I could write a lot about owner blogging (and I probably will). But the purpose of this post is to express the importance of keeping a steady schedule.  And if you need help, feel free to give me a tinkle (don’t get any ideas – that’s British for telephone call). 

Yes, you sure can. Increased traffic always impacts your SEO ranking. So this is not quite the way that conspiracy theorists might like to present it. Does Google skew search results in favor of their own Adwords customers? I have never seen evidence of this. But absolutely and categorically you can give your website a general boost in SEO ranking when traffic picks up. (To learn more information see my article about general SEO.)

My personal observation is that the amount of traffic across your website is a significant factor in ranking your website again competitors. This is especially true of websites that have a very low amount of traffic to start with. Extremely low traffic on a website is an immediate problem. It “proves” to Google that your website is not relevant and not interesting.  However this is often the biggest hurdle for a website – the “Catch 22”. It’s hard to rank well if you don’t have traffic. But you can’t get traffic if you dont have good page rank.

The answer to the catch 22 is to work over your website and stick with it till you do have a good SEO ranking and start getting some organic traffic.

But the dentists I deal with often can’t wait. Few businesses can. For a dental website that is in trouble and is lacking traffic I always recommend as step one-  “get some paid advertising running and drive traffic any old how”.

Having a good steady flow of traffic will up your ranking and Google does not seem (thus far) to penalize paid traffic. In fact, Google does not even seem to differentiate between paid or unpaid traffic.

Your SEO Ranking and Adwords Search and Display Options

My speciality is dental marketing, so I tend to do mostly dental websites and dental paid ads. I  have done so for years now so I am very familiar with conversions and what drives them. When it comes to conversions – people who actually go to a dental website and make an inquiry the search driven ads drive dramatically more conversions. However display ads are much cheaper and thus you can buy sometimes 4 display clicks for the same price as one search click.

The reason that this is a good idea is the cost-benefit ratio means that you can pay the same amount per conversion for display, but also get the benefit of lots of cheap visitors- and thus increase your SEO ranking at the same time.

Website Conversions and What Drives Them

I have consistently seen a 50/50 split between organic conversions and conversions from paid advertising. In other words, if you have a website with a good SEO ranking and are getting a decent amount of traffic from organic search, you can expect to see steady conversions on your website from that alone.

If you would like to know more about SEO there are more articles here.

Google and Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is dominated by the Google formula for evaluating websites. Because Google has over 65% of all search traffic it’s results are the yardstick that most marketing people use to judge a website. And they have since early years kept the exact formula for judging websites a very closely guarded secret. Over the years internet marketers and SEO experts have searched for ways to “cheat the system” and get their site on top of the search engine results page through tricks or manipulation of the system. However as Google detects that their formula is being used against them, they create new releases that level the playing field once more.

Search Engine Optimization- White Hat, Black Hat or Fuzzy Grey.

If you are in a competition, there are two well known ways of winning. You can compete and win because you are best, or you can cheat. In the world of search engine optimization, there are achievers and cheaters – and quite a few who hedge their bets by competing fairly and trying to cut corners at the same time.  My SEO philosophy is simple. Eventually cheaters get caught. If you want to be number 1 and stay number one, well don’t cheat, compete and win. My website contains more on Search Engine Optimization strategy.

In that regards, Google is very helpful. They don’t not say exactly the formula they uses to rank websites-but they do publish some pretty good signposts for the world to see. In fact the major google programmers often blog and try to make clear what google wants from your website to rank it well. They spell it out in great detail. They know that good ranking for a website can mean financial success and bad ranking through poor SEO can lead to financial disaster. So they have gone to great pains to tell people what do to.

Ask Yourself the SEO Questions.

One of the most educational articles in this regard is a set of 23 questions posed by Amit Singhal, a Google software engineer.

You can see the exact original 23 questions here- 23 Questions to Ask About Your Website, from the Google Blog

In summary, rather than use the latest SEO tip or trick, you are being asked to consider some very core aspects of your website’s content.

I was very interested to see the degree to which the questions posed by Mr Singhal concerned TRUST.

If you can look over your website and have 100% confidence that it would inspire TRUST then you are most of the way there. This expresses itself in many ways- the qualifications of the person writing the article, the quality and size of the article itself, the source material being referenced (if any).

Another huge factor is QUALITY.  Hastily prepared pages, with spelling errors and lots of repeating keywords will not help your cause.

Experience also tells me that well written, authoritative articles that bring valuable information or insights to the viewer are a sure fire way to bump up the ranking of a website. If you are interested in search optimization then you should take a look at the article referenced above.

That’s the real secret of great Search Engine Optimization.