Anyone who has their own website or blog need to think about SEO, its not something you can ignore. Search Engine Opimization has to be a prioritization of the people that both plan and execute on their sites. SEO doesn’t just happen, you have to be intentional when creating new posts that you want to increase your site visits and views. SEO is also always changing so you have to keep up up with the changing world. SEO for 2013 gives 10 Tips for 2013.
One of the easiest ways to increase SEO is by using the tools that google offers. Seven Ways to Use Google Webmaster Tools to Increase Traffic to your Website gives great examples and descriptions of the tools available for your use. It’s not just your websites that you can optimize. SEO also applies to your blogs posts as well. You can Improve How to Move your Blog Posts Up in Search Results one of the major factors like with anything else is to keep your blog up to date. Also, if you share your blogs posts on Google+ as I have previously discussed. It helps to increase your site visits and blog views. But, just getting people to click on the site is not the only thing, you want to know that people are spending an extended amount of time and engaging with your information. Google Analytics is one of the ways that you can measure Engagement on your Blog.
It’s October… so here are some major SEO killers.
Questions:
When thinking about SEO are you more interested in unique site visits or in onsite engagement?
How do you foresee using SEO in the future?
Helena's Piece of Mind 
Hey Helena,
Great infographic! When thinking about SEO I’m more interested in onsite engagement. It’s obviously great if a lot of people are coming to your site, but I think it’s more important to know how long they’re spending on your site, what is attracting them to your site, and overall how your site is keeping your target audience engaged. It does you no good if people are clicking on your website and never returning. Engaging content will keep people coming back, and increase your SEO.
I totally agree. You can have all the clicks in the world, but if people aren’t actually engaging with what you’re posting, it doens’t matter. When it comes to engagement you’ve got to show something different to draw people in. Hello random infographic!
Your infographic is awesome! Very appropriate! I’d say that I would be more concerned with onsite engagement. If I were able to get thousands of people to my site but they left after a few seconds, I haven’t been very successful. By focusing on engaging those who do visit, I stand a better chance of success when I start to reach out to more people. Likewise, those who are engaging on my site might be more inclined to share my site with others.
My future SEO efforts will be focused on utilizing social media, especially posting through Google+. I had never used G+ before this semester and now I don’t know how I could live without it!
I just googled myself and two of my google+ posts now pop on the front page. If that doesn’t prove that it works I don’t know what will. Site engagement is great, but the way that you get engagement is through self promotion. Something I’m really bad at. Which is crazy because I’m totally awesome!
I agree with Erin and Helena- Onsite engagement is very important. I care more about people who are spending more time on my site than I do people who just come on my site once or twice. I think engagement is key to getting people to come back and stay interested in what you have to say. I too and more interested in what is attracting them to my site and how they are spending their time on my site.
The more you know about what draws people in the easier it is to market to those people. I know my interesting wit and cool graphics draw y’all in. Which can be hard, because you keep trying to best yourself. 🙂
Such smart classmates I have! I, too, think onsite engagement is more important — but you have to get people on your site before they can engage. So you definitely want to do what you can to pull people in using SEO, social media and other tools, but I think it’s even more important what happens to them once they get there. Are you answering their questions? Making them feel valued? Giving them a reason to come back? It’s a balancing act, but I agree with everyone that onsite engagement probably tops the list.
Right, but… I would offer a caveat strictly focusing on onsite engagement. Getting your unique clicks higher is good too. This means you may be getting shares and re-shares from people who do a quick once over on your site and then share it with other people. Or, you have one blog post, photo, or video thats drawing a lot of people in even if they don’t stay long. It’s good to know what’s driving your visits
I have to jump on the same bandwagon as these lovely ladies – onsite engagement makes the most sense! The people that are spending time on my site are the ones I would rather measure and research. Granted, like Julie said, you need to make sure you are still getting new users to your site! You really need a healthy balance of continuously gaining new users AND making sure that you are taking care of and entertaining your frequent visitors.
Awesome infographic!!
I am more inclined to look for unique sites than user engagement. One person’s thoughts or review on a topic are not necessarily going to carry any weight on mine. However, I do think that social media is the future of SEO, and that engagement driven content will be the real search engine optimizer.