A keyword is a word or short phrase typed into Google search query.

For example, if you are a Boutique Real Estate Agency based on the Gold Coast, the keywords “Boutique Real Estate Agent Gold Coast” are going to be very important when it comes to your audience searching for you on Google

Google Search Console and a Keyword Research Tool: Keyword Tool, Wordtracker and Keywords Everywhere for Chrome are great tools – and free. Paid SEMRush, Ahrefs or Moz are the Gods in the world of SEO.

Establish the keywords that bring people to your site by checking your Google Search Console.

Then enter these keywords into your brand new and shiny Keyword Research tool.

When searching these keywords on your Keyword Research tool, other keywords will pop up as well.

Continuing with “boutique real estate agent Gold Coast”, other keywords such as

Best Real Estate Agent, Luxury Homes Gold Coast, Gold Coast Real Estate Market, Gold Coast Realty, Rentals Gold Coast and Holiday Rentals Gold Coast

will pop up in your Keyword Research. These extra keywords expand your options for how people search for you.

Once you understand just how many keywords apply to your business, the next step is to start applying them. So use across your website where relevant.

The greatest opportunities to use and enforce keywords are across your Content Marketing, with website landing pages, blog posts, social media posts, LinkedIn articles and Instagram hashtag strategy.

Check back with Google Console and Keyword Research Tools frequently, for any other keywords that may pop up along the way.

Content, the information and experiences directed towards a user or an audience.

This includes text, pages, articles, images, video and sounds published to our website.

Content Marketing is the strategic approach to creating connection through valuable, educational and relevant content with your audience and ultimately driving the customer to an action.

In normal speak, rather than doing the “hard sell” to your audience, customers and network about your products and services, present content that educates and solves their problems. Another nice by-product to Content Marketing is this establishes you as an industry expert and thought leader.

Content Marketing focuses on your audience and what they care about. From educational articles (like this one) to ebooks, videos, social media posts, case studies, testimonials, quotes, newsletters and email campaigns, guides, infographics, photos, podcasts, webinars, industry events, product launches, behind-the-scenes, flashbacks – and so much more, Content Marketing combines your brand message, industry, location, targeted and niche keywords, your website and social media to produce stuff your audience enjoys reading or watching. This also means you have to consistently reevaluate the keywords you research and the content you produce.

When your customers and business network enjoy your content, google considers this ‘relevant content’ – which makes google happy.

Get the Google tick of approval with relevant images to the page and topic that are also optimised for website efficiency.

Many a time, images on blogs or websites are at 4.5MEG, not web friendly and labelled as stock_image_45610101.jpeg. The image is not “optimised” and significantly slows your site’s speed down.

Optimise an image by resizing to an ideal size perfect for responsive with desktop, tablet and mobile. It;s actually easy as with Canva, ADOBE Photoshop or a handy onsite designer.

It all starts with resizing images for web at 300DPI.

For WordPress, ideal resizes are
• Feature Banner
1920 pixels wide x 1080 pixels tall
• In Page Landscape Image
800 pixels wide x 600 pixels tall
• In Page Portrait Image
600 pixels wide x 800 pixels tall
• Site Icon Image
512 pixels wide x 512 pixels tall

For Squarespace, ideal resizes are
Images
• 1500 pixels wide x 1001 pixels tall
Note: Squarespace always works to the height of your image, so as long as you keep it 1500 pixels wide, you can adjust the image height to suit your sites visual needs EG
• 1500 pixels wide x 450 pixels tall
• 1500 pixels wide x 150 pixels tall

Going the extra mile in labelling your images is an extra boost to your SEO and website traffic.

Let’s look at how I label the images for this article as an example:

The URL is blog/what-is-seo
The feature image then, is labelled what-is-seo-digttalflowu-blog.png

If you’ve gone the hard yards in researching the keywords, then apply the same keywords to your images too. A keyword-rich image name including description and alternate text. so the Google Gods show us love and benevolence forever more.

Link Building – or Backlinks – is the fundamental strategy for Smart SEO.

Backlinks are hyperlinks on a website when clicked, takes the User to another site.

🔥 Pro-tip: always make sure the hyperlink opens in a New Tab so as not to take the User away from your site

Never forget, it’s always about keeping Google happy. This means keeping Backlinks relevant to the page it’s posted on and clicking through to. Link Build where and when possible – just keep it quality over quantity.

Great Link Building can start from your website landing page, blog posts and social media posts, where other brands, affiliates, suppliers and partners you work with  can form a satisfying two-way relatioship to promote each other online – whether as a partner, guest blogger or reference – with consent of course.

If they return the favour and backlink to you from their site, blog or social media post, this is called an Inbound Link.

But as is with all things SEO, you need a careful strategy to achieve this. Backlinks to dodgy sites does nothing for your credability – and takes a lot to fix it up.

We need to focus on how real human people engage with our Brand, Product and Service. Google Spiders might crawl through your website and dig into it the way a customer can’t, but a Google Spider doesn’t buy from you and become a returning customer – nor does it follow you on Social Media

Please Google by focusing on industry, location and niche keywords for our brand message and taglines. Then expand on these into real-talk for our audiences.

This means writing and producing content that is aesthetically pleasing, educational, entertaining and valuable. So start with complete sentences, great spelling and good grammar. This avoids distracting attention from the awesome content.

This also means producing fresh, unique and engaging content – consistently.

A great Content Marketing Strategy could be

• Website blog post each week, fortnight or month

• LinkedIn Article rewritten, edited and pushed live 7 days later
  🔥 Google doesn’t like duplicate posts, and LinkedIn wants to feel special as the “article of the week” without the competition of your other blog

• Social media posts circulating around the themes of the blog and featuring quotes from the blog 2-3 times per week

• Monthly or fortnightly newsletter showcasing these themes as blogs posts

• a 15-30 second Facebook Live, Instagram Story and Youtube Video promoting your Blog going live

• a repurposed Blog for Youtube

• a repurposed Blog available for download as an eBook

Another great tactic is updating blog content. Given the never-ending changes to algorithms, Google, the internet and digital information in general, updating web pages and blog posts keeps them relevant – which is vital. Go the extra mile in making sure your website copy and blog articles are current, read well, feature great looking optimised labelled images with well-edited video means your site will be a Pleasing User Experience for Happy Site Visitors.

You can have all the great blogs with clever marketing strategy in the world, but if your site isn’t compliant to the W3C World Wide Web Consortium’s HTML standards, you’re playing checkers while everyone else is playing chess.

Web standards are a set of guidelines used to create web browsers and the sites that run on them.

Web standards are set when a great website makes for a Pleasing User Experience, allowing you to post all the awesome content you want to, when you want to.

Compliant Sites

• are accessible to people with disabilities with colours, sight, sound and more

• make it easier for Search Engine Spiders to crawl and index sites

• are designed to load quickly and efficiently

• have great architecture

• are responsive in web design, allowing for your site to be viewed across all devices, from desktop to laptops, tablets and mobile

• have title tags with H1 tags Heading 1

• have subheadings with to H2 Heading 2 and H3 Heading 3 for easy reference points

• are easy for Google spiders to crawl and index to report back to google

• have an XML sitemap

• don’t have broken URLs, which can also be fixed by a Post Redirect plugin for WordPress or handy code for Squarespace right >here.

In 2018, Statista reported 52% of all website traffic was powered through mobile phones. This means all of our sites and content need to be “mobile optimised” – as in built, developed and designed especially for mobile.  You can check if your site is optimised with Google’s mobile friendly test >here.

And finally, sites also need to display well on all browsers, such as
Google Chrome
Firefox Mozilla
Apple Safari and  
Opera 

• Create pages with keyword-based titles to help establish your page or blog’s theme and direction.
• Use keywords straight off the bat so everyone gets exactly what you’re talking about
• Use strategic search phrases on pages and blog articles to help Search Engines
• Make your Page Title and Headline catchy, clickable, relevant and unique.

For an idea on catchy headlines, Buzzsumo analysed 100 million headlines for their Most Shared Headlines Study. You can also check your headlines with The Hoth’s Headline Generator.

The Meta Description is the information displaed on Google about your page.

The Meta Data goes the extra mile where each web page and blog post requires well written meta description to accompany it.

Yoast really helps as a great guiding program for WordPress sites. They also have a more detailed blog article ”How To Create The Right Meta Description” >here.

These ideal characteristics include
• up to 155 characters
• uses an active voice
• includes a call to action
• contains the focus keyword
• matches the content, and
• is unique (and not duplicated or plagiarised)

These same characteristics translate well to Squarespace too.

A URL is the address of a World Wide Web page.

Here’s the URL of my blog article “Guide To Online Security” as an example> https://www.ladylex.com.au/blog/guide-to-online-security

Google eats URLs for breakfast – so keep your URLs simple and straightforward. After all, as Leonardo da Vinci once said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

🔥 Pro-tip: Great URLs

• feature a keyword where possible
• uses strategic search phrases
• are easy to understand for users and Search engines
• doesn’t feature numbers or characters
• always use hyphens
• are case sensitive
• don’t use capital letters to confuse readers and search engines

🔥 Pro-tip: Great places to share Social Media include

• useful, educational, entertaining content to share easily that looks great when shared

• clearly adding share buttons to your website pages and blog posts

• when link building with other brands and businesses, tagging them across social media too – everyone loves being tagged (except for spam of course)

• posting from your Business, Brand or Company pages

• with niche and location keywords that can also translate into your hashtag strategy

• a Google Business listing

An unsecure site is not a happy site, and doesn’t make for a happy Google either. Browsers also warn when websites are not secure with a nice little notice.

Keep Google and your users safe and happy with these two forms of security:

HTTPS Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure involves the data sent between your browser and the website you’re connected to. The ‘S’ at the end of HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’, indicating communications between your browser and the website are encrypted.

SSL Secure Sockets Layer is standard security for encrypted links between a web server and a browser in an online communication.

Get them both – and don’t look back.