If you’ve been following along on our bookmarkable series on SEO, then you know that we trying to cover the bases for you. In the first episode you learned about about site structure and even learned an advanced technique (what silos are). Last week we covered the first 5 essential components of SEO Success. This week we are going to dive right back in and go over the other 9 components.
Disclaimer: Sure there are more than just 9 components, but there’s only 9 that I think a small business owner should concern themselves with.4. Canoncicals
It’s a word that scares me to pronounce but, what are canonicals?
Canonical refers to using the Canonical tag.
Essentially, you’re telling google, “this page is the real page, despite where you might see this content elsewhere.” If you’re using wordpress and you’re using Yoast’s plugin, then this happens automatically.
3. Rich Snippets
To me, Rich Snippets, Schema and even SERP Features (such as Featured Snippets) are all in the same category. In basic terms, you are adding a small bit of code, like a “tag” to tell google what that piece of information is. When you do this AND IF (and there’s a big if) Google sees it, i’ll modify your SERP (search engine results page) to have some extra information. The good news is that if you’re using wordpress there’s a plugin for that. I use the WP SEO Structured Data Schema Plugin but there are others out there.
2. Content
Content is the most important part of your SEO strategy. I mention 2 things in the podcast specifically. Your most important content should be in excess of 2,000 words and you need to have a purpose behind the content. Could be lead generation, could be growing an email list, but don’t put content out there that has no purpose.
1. Links
Once your content is done, getting links to your content is paramount. There’s really 2 types of links that you want.
Internal and External links.
Internal Links are the kind we talked about two weeks ago. You link to your own content. So few business owner and bloggers for that matter link back to their old content. However, it’s a great practice and can make a big difference.
External links are the kind you get from other people (or entities). I’m not talking about trashy fiverr links or cheap spammy techniques. I’m talking about when your content is so good that someone links to it. Those kind of links are powerful.
Those links are so powerful that I’ll be spending all of next week covering 9 Most Effective Ways to Build Links.