SEO for Club Websites Part Two

Following on from his previous article on Search Engine Optimisation, Kevin McGreevy, an experienced SEO expert, akes a look at how to improve a club website by paying attention to the content, the social outreach aspect of a website and linking strategies.

Clubs can help each other online by providing good links to relevant content on eash other’s websites. It also makes a club website more entertaining for a visitor.

 

User Experience

The previous section examples (see SEO for Club Websites Part One) would bring about a better user experience. In theory it’s simple for a webmaster to better user experience, but the key is knowing how search engines rate user experience.

Search engines look to see if your website has photographs; video; social media platforms and whether you are updating the website and social media platforms.

That is only half the battle with the user experience rating. The rest comes with statistics that search engines track on your website. As a webmaster you can sign up for Google Analytics which will show all different stats about your website visitors.

How often they visited the website; if they revisited within 24 hours; how long they spent on the site; how many pages they browsed; which pages they browsed; which page they left the website on. Using algorithms the search engines use these stats to determine if the user enjoyed your website.

 

Social Outreach

This is quite new to the search engine/SEO world. Everyone is wanting to be social these days, via the internet. They have twitter, facebook and instagram accounts, posting messages and photos to friends and family and other enthusiasts all around the world.

Search engines have jumped on the social band wagon, completely changing how they rank websites. In the past it was “bad” SEO to link out of your website to another website, technically giving that website a “backlink”. People paid for these backlinks, however search engines do not want people to pay for backlinks, unless it’s through them, i.e. Adwords.

Search engines have changed their algorithm to embrace social sharing. So to link out to another club will now benefit your website, but only if the content is relevant. Link within your own website too, display similar articles to your visitor. Start with these, then include the external links.

 

Three is the key number, minimum 3 internal links and maximum 3 external links. Remember you do not want to send your visitor away from your website, it is simply a link that tells Google you are being social and providing internet users with a never ending world of relevant information.

I cannot stress enough the word “relevant”. The external article must be relevant and contain quality content. Do not send an article to the homepage of a website or a completely irrelevant page. The search engines will track where the link leads to; check the content for relevance and score accordingly.

Note: ClubWorks readers should use this external linking to their benefit. If twenty different car club websites are producing informative and quality content, then they should all be linking to each other’s articles from time to time.

Do not link to homepages, but to specific relevant articles and do not link to an article if that article is linking to your article, an immediate two way link will not be as effective.

In effect all the clubs will be showing Google that they have good outbound links and are receiving good inbound links. Google should appreciate the social sharing knowledge between the car clubs.