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Advanced Search Engine Optimization

Advanced Search Engine Optimization

By John Giovenco, President, Interon Design, Inc.

Once the initial search engine optimization has been completed, to maximize search engine performance, some advanced search engine optimization needs to be done on a regular basis.

At interon design, this advanced SEOis focused on three interconnected components:

  1. Speed
  2. Engagement
  3. Reporting

Speed

If the initial SEO was focused on good site design and standards compliance, ongoing SEO is focused on speed. People like fast websites. Therefore, Google likes fast websites. Google will reward fast websites with higher rankings. While there are many things that can be done initially to make your site fast, really big speed gains take some time, effort and knowledge.

Does your site:

  • Compress resources on the server to take up less space and therefore less bandwidth in transmission?
  • Minify resources on the web page to shrink the file size?
  • Optimize images to shrink the file size?
  • Eliminate render-blocking elements from the download?
  • Utilize browser caching?

If you answered noto any of the above, or you don't know, chances are you are missing out on some real performance gains and the bump in rankings those speed gains will generate.

Engagement

The next component of ongoing SEO is visitor engagement. While we would all love for our website to be the only site anyone needs to visit, we know that isn't realistic. Visitors spend way more time on othersites than they are ever going to spend on yours. Therefore, we have to maximize what little time they do spend on our site.

  • Can the visitor quickly find the information they are looking for? You had better make sure they can, because they will not try to find it. Instead, they will go someplace else.
  • Do you give them a reason to come back, or is your content so out of date, stale or minimal as to be useless?
  • Does your site receive incoming links from reputable, related sites?
  • Does your site have a social media presence?

Reporting

Naturally, Google has a tool for this. It is called Google Analytics. By placing a bit of Google generated code on each page of your site, we can tell just how much engagement each page has, how the page was accessed, for how long, and so on.

You can get down into some real minutiae or keep it as big pictureas you like. Of course the ultimate goal in digesting this reporting is to tweak the web page code and/or content to increase visitor engagement.

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