The developers approach to SEO

We have a simple philosophy when it comes to good SEO, great content wins. Google seconds this with their constant evolution of search algorithms to better serve the most accurate content. You see, google cares about one person, the search user. This is their customer, and without them, their business will fall apart fast.

Let’s talk about this searcher. They came here because of trust. Google is one of the worlds most trusted search engines. Its fast, easy to use, simple to navigate, not cluttered with other junk or content. The results are usually pretty spot on, and google does a good job helping the searcher with typos, suggestions and variations. This has all grown out of a labor of love by google engineers to better index content and make educated assumptions to what the page content is truly about. If google started to slip up and serve poor results, that trust is damaged.

So back to your site. You want to rank high for the things your site is about I assume. The search index is a secret recipe of metrics, scores, and comparative analysis. While this is pretty secretive, there have been years of study by SEO experts that all generally agree on a few core principals that go into that rank.

Major factors in the search rank.

Content. More specifically quality content. Your content is the number one driver of site rank. The more relative to the search your content is, the better your chances are for ranking higher.

Specific content. The good thing here is that consumers are smarter than they used to be. Someone looking for an auto repair shop no longer searches for “Auto repair shop”, they search for “Auto repair shop (insert city name here)” This narrows the results form millions to thousands. The generic term here was 70+ million results, and when I add in “Tempe AZ” it drops 99.35% to 450k. Specific content like this, paired with googles geolocation tools, should match the top 20 results closest to you. Search done!

Fast & secure content. Consumer like fast. The average consumer thinks a site is slow beyond a 6 second load time. Does your site load in less than 6 seconds? Google is siding with the searcher and giving them what they want. In another google response to the market, and giving higher rank to sites that are secure with an SSL certificate. They also will warn users if the target site appears to have been hacked.

Mobile friendly. More and more users rely on their phones to search, browse, and live their lives. I won’t bother with todays stats because they literally increase monthly. Google sees these stats, and know that a mobile user visiting a non mobile friendly page, will most often leave in seconds. So sites that are mobile responsive are also ranked higher.

This list goes on much deeper, but these are the top few factors in basic SEO planning. So what does factor1 do when building out a site?

• We start with proper site planning. What content should live where, and whats an appropriate user flow
• Content planning with search in mind. Page titles, content, URL naming, navigation links, etc. When all aspects of this plan point to keyword rich pages, the stars align with better SEO opportunities.
• Great code. This feels like a no brainer, but well formatted, organized code following tight HTML5 specifications and syntax will give google exactly what it needs to better process and understand your content.
• Fast code. We build our sites to be fast from day one. We use the right scripting, loading orders, compression to serve large sites in under 5 seconds. Most our newest sites these days are under 2–3 seconds.
• Mobile friendly. This is more than just responsive, but also paying close attention to button sizes, text size, form fields, etc. When these items are too small for touch interaction, it won’t qualify as mobile friendly.
• Secure code and CMS. We use Wordpress, and that can sometimes have a bad wrap for hacks. By using quality theme code on our end, paired with minimal plugins and avoiding obscure scripts, we eliminate the common doors for hacks.
• Quality servers. Often google will blacklist entire servers for the actions of a few sites on that server. We only use the best hosting set ups and that keeps our sites safe and fast.

Sometimes a simply philosophy has some deep roots. As you can see, we believe that with these core items in mind, your site can go a long way.