SEO Strategies – Those Commonly Forgotten or Ignored

I was reading an SEO newsletter this morning and they had mentioned a number of important SEO strategies to consider when undertaking the optimization of your website on your own.

Tips

A number of the SEO tips were quite common and should be practiced by all SEO strategists, not only those working on their own sites, but also those working for agencies and an actual SEO company. Some of those tips include:

  • Navigation and internal linking
  • Titles & Meta tags
  • Unique content
  • Relevant backlinks & continuous linking programs

There were two other SEO tips that I feel are generally disregarded or not implemented on a frequent basis:

The Value Proposition (VP) issue isn’t always that easy to resolve quickly, because it takes a lot of constructive thinking in order to determine what sets your business apart from your competitors – especially how to communicate that to your potential customers. A good VP can make a world of difference on how your website converts visitors to sales (or leads).

The other item was the “Code bloat / Site download time”, which I strongly feel is overlooked on a regular basis.

The concept is simple… reduce the size of your pages (code & images) and they’ll load faster, enabling better usability from your site visitors, as well as allowing the search engines to spider your pages more quickly. There are a number of rather easy ways to reduce your code bloat & increase your website’s download speed:

  • Convert all inline JavaScript to external files and call them as separate files
  • Convert embedded font styles & formatting to an external CSS file and reference it as a separate file
  • Optimize the size of the images on your pages – For some industries/markets, having crystal clear images is important and those visitors should be willing to wait a few more seconds. For most industries, however, they’re not going to wait, so your fancy, slow loading image is actual a friction point that will hurt your chances of converting that visitor.

Conclusion

There’s nothing that I’ve mentioned here that’s “new” – it’s common knowledge. Use these SEO tips on your website and you’ll see improved results.