It’s time for part two of our hand-picked tips for SEO in 2019! Last week we covered off some of the more recent methodologies that we’ve started to adopt, but today we’re going with the stuff that has proven itself important time and time again over the years as evidenced and observed through the work of our main Strategists who have been offering SEO Services in Brisbane for quite some time. We believe all of it to still be important to consider and implement as part of any campaign despite the fact that purely in terms of being ranking factors (not necessarily in terms of implementation) they have been around since the early days. So without further ado, let’s dive in!

1 – SEO Site Structure

Yours truly has been doing SEO Services in Brisbane and abroad for the better part of a decade and one thing that has never changed is the way that you structure your website being important. The actual way in which you structure your information has changed quite a bit, but it’s still a consideration that stands front and centre with regards to making your website as SEO friendly as possible. If I could impart the single most important piece of information to you it would be that aside from ensuring your information is categorised in a user-friendly and sensical fashion via the main menu, you need to ensure that you bring as much of your content towards the front of the page as possible.

By this I mean that if it can’t fit in the main menu (say for large e-commerce sites with lots of products for example) then you at least need links to exhaustive category pages of those products where you can fit as much of your content within 2-3 clicks of any other page onsite as possible so that you can increase the amount of content that will be indexed and assessed for search results.

2 – SEO Per Page Structure

Before we get into metadata, let’s talk about how you’re structuring your written content and the pages they occupy. Firstly, while there’s no hard data to point to when our Brisbane SEO Experts say that a clear path to a contact method and the main menu on each and every page on the site is important, the last point in this blog (User Friendliness) should demonstrate why that would be, so we’ll simply say here that you need to think about how you frame the written content with such things in a manner that makes them accessible and doesn’t hinder that experience.

With regards to the content itself, this can get a little murky. For the past few years we have sworn by the idea that particular word counts should be adhered to across the board. This was based on good research and development that clearly showed pages between 800-1200 words ranking best on mobile devices and anything past that ranking best on desktop devices. However a lot has changed in the 3 years since that study such as mobile first indexing, Google’s real-time assessment against its algorithms, it’s general ability to better “read” content like a real person to ascertain its value and much more. For this reason we tend to err on the side of caution and adhere to particular word counts (keeping to a minimum of 800 words wherever possible) while acknowledging that if we (being humans) know that it’s not natural or possible to artificially inflate every page with this amount of content, then Google’s algorithms (trying to be human) are likely now advanced enough to know same and not require robotic adherence to such rules.

It still remains pertinent however to stick to the guidelines wherever possible.

3 – Website Metadata for SEO

There really are no huge changes here. You should have keywords assigned to each and every URL as part of the broader structure of the page (so each URL should either be a parent page for a theme with the parent keywords assigned to it or a sub-page as part of one of these themes with relevant related keywords assigned to it) and the metadata should target/include those keywords accordingly. Again, we’ve got an onsite SEO Blog here that you can view for more context, but a little tidbit we can offer that’s unique to today’s blog it’s that there is a bit of research suggesting that when you’re setting H tags for your page, it’s best to utilise a related keyword for the H1 and the main assigned keyword in the H2 tag.

4 – User Friendliness (UX)

We’ve kind of covered this already via the previous three points, but we’d like to make a particular point about good rule of thumb. Google do for sure have a laundry list of requirements that they want you to meet and any SEO Company in Brisbane would love to talk your ear off about them for hours on end to show how knowledgeable they are. But at the end of the day, if you consider the customer/client experience in everything that you do with your website, you’ll be pretty well insured against terrible rankings by simply using your intuition. Whether it’s how to structure your main menu, the things you need to explain, the pages that need to exist or any other element of the customer experience, if you’re offering a genuinely valuable and helpful journey through the site then chances are Google likes you.

5 – Context (SEO Links)

We’ve already somewhat covered the point I’m about to make here with the previous blog’s sections(insert link to previous blog) on internal and external contextual linking, but let’s take it a step further and say the following: Your links between your own pages onsite, your links out to other websites and the links from outside websites to your page are all part of the one ranking factor. You are being assessed for how you connect to other relevant information under any of those circumstances so that it can be ascertained how effective you are at providing the right information to consumers. Whether they need to see another page on your site, a page offsite, or whether other sites point to you for information related to them, it’s all about context. If you are furnishing the end user with everything they can possibly need, then you are a contender for the front page.

So with that all said and the previous blog also out there in the public domain, our hope first and foremost is that you take away a few key tips that hopefully tie into an overall narrative surrounding being of service to end users in ways that Google admires and rewards you for. At the end of the day no amount of technical understanding of the ever changing technical requirements of search engines will serve you as well as adopting the right philosophy and having your website reflect it.

As always if you’d like to add anything you think we’ve missed then please feel free to comment below or if you’d like to know more or explore your options with regards to SEO services in Brisbane then you can get in touch!