With all good Search Engine Optimization, it’s good to have a flow chart to help direct your efforts. We tried to come up with all the work we perform on a website to help it rank better and have divided our efforts into four main focus areas.

SEO Flow Chart

Website Design: This is a fundamental part of your search engine rankings. The website must be structured in such a way that makes it easy for Google to decide what this page is about with ease (title tags, proper heading tag usage, etc.). The site should also employ the most modern development techniques, at the time of this writing some of those techniques would be the usage of HTML5, responsive design, no errors, fast load time, etc.

On-page: A majority of the work during the initial months is done with the on-page optimization. As you can tell in the SEO flow chart there is a lot that goes on. We use wordpress for 99% of our sites so a majority of the work goes into configuring the correct plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast. We use Yoast because of it’s constant updates to accommodate changes in SEO land in order to keep the sites as current as possible. I could go on-and-on about on-page SEO but we’ll keep it short for now. Let me know if you have any questions down in the comments.

Off-page: Some more considerable time is spent doing off-page optimization for a website. This has been evolving more and more, especially since the recent hummingbird update from Google. One of our main focus points is consistency on the web, making sure your brand shows up with the same information in all the essential places. So we make sure your profiles on social networks are current, accurate, and consistent. We also update or add the company to some common and popular directories that are browsed by Google. But the off-page doesn’t stop after the initial setup has finished… You’re only just getting started.

On-going: After the first three pieces are in place, we dedicate our attention to an ongoing strategy of link building, social sharing, performing regular content audits, and website maintenance. This on-going work is where you really start to get some phenomenal results in the serps. Keeping your site active online is the way that Google knows you’re paying attention to the internet and giving it as much as you can. Definitely a lot to learn in this area, but the basics are easy to understand.

We strive to present a company to “the internet Gods” in the best light possible by following the techniques laid out above in our SEO flow chart, then we follow up with some on-going efforts in order to help increase conversions.

What else would you to do further optimize a website for search engines?