SEO is a very complex spiderweb of tactics that you need to master in order to ensure your website and web pages rank well in search engines like Google and Bing (never rule Bing out! – I will surely write more on that later).
I have been developing websites and working on SEO for the better part of 20 years now and I can safely say that these are the most critical things to ensure you have in place for SEO in 2018.
- https (your website must be running on https)
- responsive design (your website must function flawlessly on mobile devices)
- site speed (speed matters, test your site, reduce image and video sizes, make sure your scripts are optimized)
- infrastructure architecture (your menus, internal links, user flow of your website needs to be built for the best user experience possible)
- back links (websites with great domain authority absolutely, without a doubt, need to be linking back to your website)
- your sitemap must be functioning properly.
- on page images (alt tags, file names, and descriptions in place)
- Google+ (regardless of what anyone says, make sure your website and company are listed in google)
- On page Keyword Density (You should ensure that your page has has your focus keyword in it, and related content)
The over arching strategy for SEO is that you need to build your website for the best user experience possible. You also need to provide content that provides the end user with what they were attempting to consume, or in other words that answers their questions. Google is smart enough to know when someone searches for a keyword, ends up on your page and then quickly goes back to google and searches again. Think about it logically, if someone goes to your website after searching for something and then returns to google still looking for that content you most likely did not solve the problem for them. SEO is about problem solving.
Also remember that a well executed SEO strategy is ongoing, and can take anywhere from 6 months to a year to start producing real results. Your executive team may not appreciate hearing that, but it is the law of the land.