Digital White Papers

39 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING TECHNOLOGY SEO and Web Design Best Practices But, according to Igor, having a great CMS is not nearly enough to make a dent in rankings if your keywords have any competition at all. In this case search engines will consider a large number of "off-page" factors to assess how reliable and authoritative your content is. Aer all, it's their job to filter out the SPAM. So in order to have an SEO initiative with any lifespan, you must consider the competition that exists today and in the future, and establish both strong on-page and off-page practices. To be truly thorough you must also track how each of your keywords are performing at regular intervals. Is SEO losing its relevance? Not yet… but in certain respects, a lile. Optimization has not yet lost its relevance because it is what helps produce relevant results for search engines. However, there is an increasing influence from an individual's location, user behaviors, and website popularity which are changing how search engines produce results. Why can one piece of content appear on page 1 of Google's search results while a piece of content from another website of nearly equal word length, keyword density, and page structure show up on page 3 of the search results? Answer: Location, user behaviors and popularity indicators, among others, seem to be more heavily weighted than in the past, and will likely be weighted even more in the future as search engines get smarter and collect more intelligence on user's desires. L O C A T I O N Some of these cues, such as location, can be found through on-page indicators like telephone number(s), physical address(es), language, etc. that can be easily identified. These indicators will signal that (for our example, NYCexample.com) a website is likely targeting people in New York, New York, United States of America. If the user is searching from a known location in New York, the results from NYCexample.com could assumingly rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) than if a user were searching for the same keywords but are located at a known location in rural Oklahoma. According to Igor, search engines will assume a certain geography associated with particular searches. So if you search for a plumber, it is assumed you want someone local, whereas a search for furniture may give you a larger geographic scope (or more likely, online stores). It is not know what keywords influence what scope, but most general legal terms trigger a local scope. U S E R B E H A V I O R A N D U S E R E X P E R I E N C E Cookies, caches, and saved environments (like logging into your Google account) can affect the way that a user is delivered results. The user experience and the accessibility of content also impacts search engine rankings. The more searches a user submits in an environment which the behavior can be tracked can influence future searches. Search engines can then aempt to produce more tailored results based on the previous search behavior of people in your vicinity. Tailored results are Takeaway: Create location listings on your website and on local directories for all of your office locations. These listings can help influence how your website content displays in search results. Tools: Yext, HubSpot Marketing The user experience and the accessibility of content also impacts search engine rankings. The more searches a user submits in an environment which the behavior can be tracked can influence future searches.

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