Search engine optimization is one of the key factors in boosting your brand’s visibility on the Internet. With over 6,500,000,000 global searches every day – and over three-quarters of Americans owning a smartphone – search engines have become an important area of focus for a business’s marketing plan.

To optimize your website for SEO, it needs to begin in the design and development of your site. From there, various tools and digital and social media marketing strategies can help your SEO grow even more. Here’s an overview on establishing a solid SEO strategy for your recreation center’s website.

How Do They Search?

Think of the World Wide Web as a large host of information, with links holding the figurative web together. While early search engines merely looked for word matches, modern search engines take in over a hundred other factors, in order to intelligently produce the most relevant results. One such factor is the popularity of a page; the higher the popularity of the page, the more likely it is a relevant result.

These factors become much more complicated but you can find the most relevant search engine ranking factors with a quick Google search. Once you understand how search engines rank results, you can use this knowledge to make your website rank higher, allowing more prospective members to find you.

Start with the Basics

Increasing your SEO starts from the ground up. The method your website developer uses to add images and videos can affect how easily people can find your site. Looking up the Google web cache version of your website can give you a good look at what search engines see when they look up your website. Ensuring your site is communicating properly with search engines is the first step towards increasing your website’s Google PageRank. Crawlable link structures are another way to communicate with search engines effectively. There is an extensive list of design and development basics, to make your website optimized, that will make a big impact on your website’s visibility.

Frank Carson, Recreation Services Manager for the City of El Cajon Recreation Department, gave us some of his best tips on SEO, during one of our previous webinars. You can follow along with the full recording here. His breakdown of what Google PageRank looks for includes a focus on a human audience, usage of keywords that you anticipate people to search, backlinking, link building, and user-friendly written content. The webinar covers additional factors, such as first click optimum, avoiding static webpages, inbound links, rich snippets, and more.

Tools of the Trade

Search engines are increasing their willingness to allow webmasters to positively affect their search rankings, increasing the reliability of search engines, while giving the spotlight to websites that make it easy for search engines to find them. Search engines themselves provide some of the most useful tools. With sitemaps, robots.txt, meta robots, Google Search Console and other tools that help you guide and communicate with search engines, there are many different SEO opportunities to explore. Even creating a complete Google My Business listing can earn you valuable search engine credibility.

Keep on Track

To truly optimize, you’ll need to track metrics. Determine what your most important metrics are — which of the metrics are most important in helping you accomplish your organizational goals? These key performance indicators need to be tracked from their baseline, to effectively determine how your SEO strategy affects your PageRank. Check out Kissmetrics's Google Analytics strategies, to better measure your SEO performance.