Every January, millions of people create resolutions and set goals to better their daily lives such as losing weight or quitting smoking. But what about your SEO? What steps are you taking to enhance your website's presence on the web?

As you may know, 2011 was a historical year for Google, which included some major algorithm updates and the launch of its own social network (Google+ link). With much of the spotlight aimed at maximizing your SEO around these changes, it's easy to get sidetracked by the seemingly inevitable shift towards a more social web and forget about the small stuff.

However, you shouldn't forget about that small stuff just yet. As a social web places more emphasis on trust and authority, on-page SEO is becoming less about chasing the algorithm and more about creating useful, sharable, rich web pages that deserve rankings based on quality. 

Resolve to follow these 6 steps and get your SEO in shape for the year to come.

1. Create Search Friendly URLs

Although only a tiny part of the equation, you should get in the habit of creating search friendly URLs for each new page. Apart from the obvious search benefit of having keywords in your URLs they can still help as providing anchor text when people use the URL to link to the page. They also improve user experience by confirming to the user that they're on the correct page. Fission automatically generates unique URLs for each page based on the page title, but they can easily be changed within the Page Manager.

2. Make The Most Of Your Meta

Since much of the weight of Meta keywords and descriptions has been diluted over the years, this task is most beneficial from a social standpoint. Though, adding good Meta data to a page will never hurt you. Presently, many social sharing sites (including Google+ and Facebook) automatically pull the Meta descriptions from shared links and add them to each post. While most of this information can be changed manually by the user who is posting it, many are not aware of this, making it a great opportunity to promote your page's (and website's) content. Adding Meta data to your pages is as easy as clicking the "Search Engines" tab in the Fission WYSIWYG Editor.

3. Utilize Heading Tags to Their Full Potential

Heading tags have been part of on-site SEO practices for years, however they are often ignored. Heading tags allow the SEO to flow through your page and they help users scan to confirm that they are on the page that they desire. If your <H1> and <H2> tags do not currently use keywords or phrases, take the time to develop new, relevant headlines that have the ability to optimize your site for search. For example, change the <H1> tag on your "About Us" page to "About (Company Name)." Also keep in mind that there should only be one <H1> per page.

4. Create Original and Relevant Content

Since your website is some of the most valuable marketing collateral that you have, be sure to give it the attention that it deserves. Forget about optimal keyword density and write for the end-user, keeping your strategy in mind and using keywords as you see fit. Great content encourages sharing and is vital to content marketing and creating a social web.

5. Optimize Your Copy

Once your copy has been written with your target audience in mind, you should go back through and lightly optimize it, but only where fitting. Use synonyms for some keywords to avoid being too repetitive and feel free to add a few internal (or quality external) links to your copy, altering the anchor text if necessary. Once you're done, ask yourself "Does this feel optimized?" If so, then you've done too much and you'll need to tone it down. Google will penalize pages and sites for targeting search engines over users. Remember, the focus is on creating high-quality pages that deserve to rank.

6. Include Images & Videos

When done properly, including images and video is a great way to make a page more sharable, while simultaneously giving it a SEO boost. However, in order to reap the search benefits, both must be optimized. This means using keywords in image file names and creating keyword specific Alt Text (which can be found in Fission's Image Manger) to help search engines index the files. Sound like a hassle? According to an article in the New York Times, Google has indexed over 10 billion images and people view around a billion pages with image results each day.

Have you been actively following these SEO rules and not seeing any further improvement in your search rankings? It may be time to consider more aggressive options such as a link building campaign, development of custom landing pages, or even pay-per-click advertisements. Contact an Account Manager today at 360psg.com or 716.829.7373 to learn more.