Guide To the New SEO – Total Internet Optimisation Part 2

Guide To the New SEO – Total Internet Optimisation Part 2

This is the second part of a series of articles that reflect how search engine optimisation has been changing. The guide describes a more powerful way of looking at this online marketing discipline and it introduces a approach to internet optimization entitling it “Total Internet Optimisation (TIO).

The second part of the guide begins by describing 30 Total Internet Optimisation critical procedures, and then moves on to describe a link building strategy, having in mind the total internet optimisation of your website.

1. 30 SEO/Total Internet Optimisation critical procedures:

There are a series of crucial procedures one needs to following, if you want to have the best SEO strategy for your website. Those procedures are the following:

1. Choice of a strong domain name and a web system that dynamically generates search engine friendly URLs for product and content pages
2. Ability to specify / edit URLs for individual pages via CMS – this is important for campaign landing pages and micro sites.
3. Consistency across the keyword DNA and the content strategy and indexation.
4. 301 redirects to preserve search engine rankings
5. Avoiding duplicate content and use of the canonical tag when relevant
6. Support for linking of different theme/product pages and content pages to improve internal linking – should be delivered via the Catalogue Management tool or CMS
7. CSS absolute positioning for text links on product list pages to ensure the first link for each product is keyword rich
8. Dynamic XML sitemap that is submitted on a regular basis. If you have news,  a news site map
9. HTML sitemap that is auto generated based on your catalogue and site structure
10. Support for rich snippets within platform – encoding of data in RDF format e.g. customer ratings & reviews
11. Custom 404 error page and automated report to flag error pages so your internal team can take action (you can achieve this through a separate monitoring tool such as Indiabook)
12. Robots.txt file is provided and you can access and edit when required
13. Core provision for meta content (title, description, keywords) that is auto-generated when you load new products and content pages and can also be edited easily from within the CMS
14. Text links in navigation not images; if coders are using sIFR (flash replacements) push them for clarification on how this is being done to ensure it complies with accessibility standards
15. Keyword optimised H tags within html for headings – structure for use of H1 to H6 to provide a relevant hierarchy of content
16. Ensuring flash objects are search engine friendly
17. Ensuring pdf content is readable e.g. captions for images, document meta data
18. Graceful degradation – when elements like JavaScript, flash are disabled in the browser, key content is still visible to search engine spiders/bots as well as to visitors
19. RSS feeds to support product and news announcements e.g. deal of the day
20. Page load time to meet agreed threshold but make sure you define how load speed is measured e.g. after all the page elements have loaded – this factor was included in Google’s algorithm in 2010
21. Social media content such as blogs are hosted on your primary website domain using an SEO friendly blog engine (e.g. WordPress is better than Blogger) – blogs usually sit on a sub-domain such as blog.yoursite.com to ensure you benefit from the search engine juice.
22. Avoiding the ‘copy and paste’ trap
23. Duplicating that unique and valuable description
24. Not paying attention to the affiliate channel
25. Revealing way too much
26. Making profound changes to the website
27. Integrating the website in the social graph with Add this buttons and related
28. Facebook (open graph) and Twitter integration
29. Social Media total integration.
30. Total Internet Optimisation.

It is essential that site-specific SEO and social media requirements are accurately documented during your project scoping phase, to ensure you evaluate the relative optimisation strengths of potential vendors.

The following infographic, resumes the 30 procedures:

Infographic by Maria Fonseca

2.  Link Building for Total Internet Optimisation

According to most of the industry experts it takes around a minimum of 10 weeks on average to see 1 rank jump. But if you start link building now, you won’t see results in 10 weeks or sooner, as the 10 week estimate implies that you have already a sound system in place and a website that Google and most of the social media engines have already indexed.

So bear in mind that it takes a long time to get links from a (legitimate and effective) link building campaign. Each link building strategy has different steps which imply a varying amount of time, based on the team / platforms you use / work for and the background / resources you already have.

Here’s a comprehensive list of steps you should keep in mind. It is critical to work with online PR. You can work with your PR team to start optimizing their media hits to also include good links. The success of this strategy will vary based on whether you’re going for general Domain Authority link building — in which case, all of those homepage links they’re getting will help you a lot — or trying to build Page Authority to individual landing pages, in which case they’ll probably have a hard time helping you out.

Step 1: Map and focus on your long tail right segment 

Step 2: Reach out to relevant communities
The way to reach out to relevant communities is important as it is a great way to acquire links. One can reach out via forums or Slack’s chat rooms, or private chats, or it could be IRC. It could be a whole bunch of different things such as blog comments, media and digital press and publications

Step 3: Build a link acquisition spreadsheet
You need to build a link acquisition spreadsheet. The way to construct the spreadsheet is not that dissimilar to how we do keyword research, except we’re prioritizing things based on answering questions such as:

“How important is this and how much do I feel like I could get that link? Do I have a process for it? Do I have someone to reach out to?”

Step 4: Execute, learn, and iterate
Once you’ve got your list you should go through the process of actually using these approaches and these opportunity types to reach out to people, get the links that you’re hoping to get. This is the phase when one needs to execute, learn, and iterate.If you engage in a  one-to-one outreach that doesn’t bring the results you want, it is then time to ask:
“Why was that? Why didn’t that resonate with those people?”

Step 5: Create and build a solid link building strategy 

A critical way to maximise SEO is to have a sound and detailed, methodic link building strategy. Therefore the focus on creating and building a solid link building strategy is something that an organisation / website team / manager needs to put the effort on. It takes from 3 weeks – 2 month but it is worth it!

Step 6: Implement the following top link building tactics

Creation of infographics and its outreach (1–3 months)
Share prospect lists via BuzzStream
Use Twitter and Facebook to create links and search for email addresses
Check annual reports
Search for your target on YouTube

Finally, don’t forget to analyse you competitors links.

Guide To the New SEO – Total Internet Optimisation Part 3