With the Hummingbird update, Google made keyword data for sites secure. This means that webmasters can no longer see what people are searching to get to their website. The change greatly alters search engine optimization techniques, but also forces sites to produce quality content in order to rank well. To adjust to this change, websites must now focus on pages. Page-centric search optimization requires optimizing pages for more than one keyword.
OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGES
Each page on your website will need to be optimized for search engines. This is more than just adding keywords, though your content should be using the previously mentioned LSI method of SEO. Don’t just focus your efforts on your homepage. Every single page on your site should be getting attention. There are several areas to focus on. Internal links. Linking between pages is good SEO strategy. It’s also very easy to do, so there is no excuse to skip this step in optimization. Use anchor text to help search engines recognize what your site is about, so they can rank it appropriately. One quick way of adding numerous Internal Links to your website is by adding Breadcrumbs to your pages. These provide an additional feature of helping the search engines understand the page structure of your site. External links. Social media is ideal for linking to your individual pages. Remember to include social media buttons on your pages so everyone can share your links. You can also do guest posts and interact with the general community to help build backlinks that are high quality. Do be careful, since poor quality links can actually harm your site. Eliminate errors. Make sure that any links you have on your site are live. This is something that should be checked at least every quarter to prevent dead links from appearing on the pages. Use multiple keywords. The days of using just one keyword per page are long gone. Now, to stay ahead, you need to optimize for several on each page. See the section on Semantic Search for more information on this method. While multiple keyword phrases are a good idea, one should be chosen as the primary keyword. Don’t forget images. Google’s image search has improved in leaps and bounds over the past year. Take advantage of this by including relevant images on your site. If you can use originals, this will get you better rankings. The file name and the alt text should include your keywords, as well, to ensure the pictures show up in the right searches. Also be sure to optimize your images so that they don’t adversely affect your page load times.
