How can you increase the SEO-friendliness of your existing sites? We now know the way to Google’s heart is with organic search traffic; Google can distinguish between black hat (robot reads) and white hat (organic user engagement) tactics and has made it clear it’s sticking with white hat. So how to generate the organic traffic? It’s all about building and maintaining a community, a group of people, an audience who is genuinely interested in what you have to share.  Once you generate your base of loyal community members, you will be privy to an ongoing conversation of relevant topics that are appealing to readers wanting to engage.

 

1. Identify Your Best Performing Pages & Untapped Opportunities

Take a moment to understand the content on your site and what it’s doing for you. Is your content performing well? What is getting a lot of traffic? What isn’t? You can use Google Analytics to other tools to learn about your content. What content are you sharing the most because you think it’s most relevant? What are you missing? A tool such as MarketMuse can help you find relevant terms that you may have missed. While some may not fit, some might be great for a new blog post or conversation starter. Once you understand the “lay of the land” you should have a good picture of future opportunities within your content and have an idea for how to optimize what’s currently there.

 

2. Update Title Tags & Meta Descriptions for Key Pages

As we know, the primary goal of the content is to serve as support for the community content, not to drive traffic to your site. It should remain simple for your customers or prospects to ask questions and have them answered.

However, there are few things you can do to make your existing content more SEO-friendly. Make sure your title tags for support content have valuable terms or a modified version of the core key term for which the page is ranking. The same goes for meta descriptions; craft a specific meta description that speaks to the searches.

I’ll continue with more specific tips next month. Stay tuned.