Harvest These 5 Types of SEO Fruit
I like to think of SEO as being similar to farming. Not content farms, but actual farming. You plant some seeds, and if taken care of properly, you can reap the benefits of your labor. For most site owners, even if they’ve already reaped some of those benefits, there are five specific things they can do to help improve the results for their site if they haven’t already: incoming links, defining a site’s URL, Title tags, internal linking and analytics.
1. Incoming Links
Broken Links
It’s not surprising that broken inbound links can put a real dent in your traffic. Even if you’ve got a stellar 404 page, I’d make it a mission to get every broken link updated.
It really isn’t that hard, once you’ve located those links, it’s as easy as 1-2-3-4:
- Make a note of all the 404s.
- Make a note of what the new URLs need to be.
- Locate the contact information on the site linking to you with the 404.
- Send an email asking the URLs to be changed.
In order to find the 404s, I’d use Google Webmaster Tools. There you’ll find all the 404s indexed by Google. Also set a reminder to check this section every month in case some more pop up.
Rerouting Links
Everyone wants their website to show up in the search results for X keyword. But, if you’re targeting multiple keywords and you offer a variety of products/services, directing all traffic to the homepage can get tricky.
Use the same steps as above to find the links, and then sort them according to anchor text and relevance. And even by location, if you’re really in the mood.
For instance, if you’re site is about fruit, you might want to rank for apples, oranges, pineapples, etc. It’s better to point the links about apples to the page on your site about apples, and then the same for oranges and pineapples.
2. Define Your Site’s URL
Send Traffic to the Right Place
The first thing I always do when I look at a site is to see if the www version is redirecting to the non-www version or vice versa. Having both versions up can negatively impact a site’s ranking.
Pick one and set up a 301 redirect to send traffic (and links, as applicable) to the desired location. In some cases, other versions of the site may appear, such as, “http://example.com/index.html”.
This is just a default file your server looks for when one hasn’t been defined.
3. Title Tags
Make the Tags Relevant
As with rerouting links, you want the Title tags to vary and also correlate the information on the page.
Spamming Stuffing Labeling every page with the same words isn’t very smart when you’re informing the search engines what those pages are about.
It doesn’t make much sense to name every page of your website (company name). It does make sense to name them (product/service name) | (company name).
4. Internal Linking
Broken Links
Since I keep referencing the first section of this post, make sure you read it again. Broken internal links are a bad thing.
Not only does it provide the user with a poor experience, it shows you aren’t maintaining your site. A downed internal page might also cause one to question how updated the information is on the site.
It’s just as important to remove old information and redirect pages as it is to keep the information updated and fresh. Xenu Link Sleuth is a pretty good tool to catch these errors.
Use of Anchor Text
Using anchor text internally is another good way of directing traffic (and search engines) to the informative sections of your site. It’s also a lot better than using “click here” or “check this section”.
Think of it as describing to the user where they are being taken should they click on a link internally. The deeper your site goes, the more varied your anchor text should get.
5. Analytics
Traffic Sources
So you’ve spent time beefing up your site to rank for certain key terms, but not all of your traffic is coming from the search engines. Or is it?
Google has its own analytics/webmaster tools which are fairly easy to set up. Once you get it up and going, let the data accumulate and you can start seeing how much of your traffic is coming from the search engines.
Not only that, but you’ll be able to see if those backlinks you’ve been building are paying off. After all, backlinks aren’t only there to increase the popular vote; they’re also supposed to help with traffic.
Keyword Ideas
There’s this cool section in Google Analytics that shows you what key terms visitors are using for your site being returned in the SERPs.
This is a great way to see how well some terms are performing, show possible terms you haven’t thought of and even give some insight as to how well your branding is performing.
If your site is about computers and some of the search terms people are finding your site by are “fruits and veggies”, you might want to look into why that’s happening.
Either way, this section can provide some insight as to how users are searching for your site and how they are finding it.
So those are my quick fixes, so to speak, on making the fruits of your SEO labor even juicier. In addition to these, what would you say are some things that are most-often overlooked to maximize SEO benefits?
About Joshua Titsworth
Joshua Titsworth is an SEO manager with Search Fanatics.
When he’s not online tweeting or blogging, he’s at home with his family or at a local golf course trying to break 80 … but first he must break 90.
15 Replies to “Harvest These 5 Types of SEO Fruit”
Good article Joshua.
I highly recommend using Analytics to find new keywords.
Try looking at the keywords from organic and PPC, and then sort them by e-commerce(if it is a webshop). There will almost always be keywords that you could be using in you SEO work
Good points, Josh. Sadly, many sites can be found to have several instances of two or more of these five issues. I still come across sites that have identical titles on all pages.
Joshua, great points.
Nick raised a very good point
“You don’t want all of your links pointing to the home page.”
Deep linking is important. You don’t want all of your links pointing to the home page. The search engines rank individual pages of a website. Include anchor text links for internal pages to drive traffic to those pages too.
Thanks for sharing Joshua. The first tip is helpful, never thought that we can email them to change our broken links. And send the right traffic to the right place reminds me in link building. Put a proper anchor text, link to right page will help in SEO for each page of my website! :)
Another “fruity” (meant in a positive way) SEO post. The second part to point 2 is great, and is a common fault. My own “fruity” post, “Title Tags are One of the Low Hanging Fruits of SEO – Go Pick Them!” can be found here: http://bit.ly/ho3bOQ
The basics are always great to be refreshed on at any level; thanks for the nice article, Josh! Going off of your idea about keywords, I also think that (and this may be too basic, so forgive me) it’s important to simply have quality copy in order to incorporate the right key terms and get clients visiting your site for the right reason.
Well written article Josh. I’d add page load times to your list of low hanging fruits. Sometimes its as simple as taking a large image and splicing it, other times it may be more complex – all in all, poor load times will create problems for an se spider and for the end user.
Ping pong champ? Not for long.*devious grin.
Jey, I’ll deal with you when you get back! ;) But you’re right, page load time is something to take note of.
Great tips Josh, especially the one about rerouting your link building techniques. Often people just focus on the homepage and tend to miss out on high-quality link juice that way.
Thanks Zunaria, you’re right. And more than just passing link juice I think it comes down to the user experience and getting conversions. The less potential consumers have to navigate to find the information they want the better it is for you.
Hi Josh,
I always love to read articles that focus on fundamentals. People are always looking for the “secret” sauce and yet often don’t have the basics in place to support a “secret”‘should they find one! I specifically love the part you touched on regarding broken links causing doubt for users about current website content. Whenever I end up on a website with broken links and I’m a potential customer, I often wonder if the company has the resources to support my business? I automatically assume that if they don’t have the resources to keep their links updated, they probably can’t support me to the full extent neded as a customer.
I couldn’t agree with you more about the user experience. If I’m looking to buy something or get more information about a company and having trouble finding what I want due to broken links, why should I care if the company doesn’t?
Hey Joshua,
A really nice write-up here. The most important point that I found in it was sending traffic to right source of “www” or “non-www” version. A lot of people fail to understand the gravity of that point but hopefully this post will clear their doubts up.
Hey Nishant,
Thanks for taking time to comment and I agree. Of the ones on this list sending traffic to the right source is the one I always bang my head against my desk on. It’s such an easy fix I always tell a potential client that’s something they could fix right away.