Friday, August 29, 2014

The Invisible SEO Substratum of Page Structure and Content

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a never-ending quest for marketing gold.  I change my SEO tactics all the time in my quest for massive Web traffic.  The Holy Grail of a high Google rank remains elusive.  Emergent tactics give Web stars a cutting edge.

Backlinks matter.  Google's web crawler bots rank a site by the quantity and quality of links it receives from other sites.  Quality means high domain authority, and that formula is the subject of guesswork among the professional SEO community.

Landing pages matter.  Social media gurus think that landing pages using popular keywords, globally visible privacy settings, internal photo links, and deep content make a landing page more visible to Google's search algorithm.

Content matters.  More content on a page attracts more traffic.  Deep content counts for more than thin content.  A combination of images, text, and video linked together in a block is deep content.  Some combination of these blocks on a page is optimal but I suspect that varies by each social media site or content aggregator that channels syndicated content.

Enhancing visibility matters.  Rich snippets from a page that show up in search engines provide more SEO visibility.  Duplicate description tags boost traffic by grabbing additional content from a page and making it visible to searches.

Sharing matters.  I suspect that it matters more now that the unethical practice of purchasing Facebook likes and Twitter followers is widely known.  Sharing is one social media function that has not yet been outsourced to cheap labor using fake logins.  Sharing boosts a page's Google rank if it generates backlinks to the original content.

The implied call to action for webmasters is to optimize their public webpages and social media landing pages in ways that accommodate the phenomena above.  Building out these enhancements and actively curating content means the landing pages get noticed in Google searches.  Facebook's Custom Stories API is a good example of a tech that allows social media developers to easily build multifunctional content for multiple social media channels.

Alfidi Capital does not have some multidisciplinary team of designers, analysts, and engineers.  I do all of this myself, and my main focus is generating content.  If my writing is good enough, it will overcome whatever I can't do to max out my visibility to Google.