If gaining or maintaining a strong Natural Search presence for your website is in part your responsibility, then it’s essential to understand the additional elements that drive SEO results today.

The best way I can think of to describe the evolution of SEO is that the playing field has gone from singularly to multi-dimensional. The basics of intelligent site architecture and navigation still matter, as do keywords, content, meta data and alt tags, but there are so many other factors.

Google’s clear-cut direction for their search engine results pages is all-inclusive. Content is encouraged, be it blog posts, images, video, tweets, etc. The more relevant and frequent the content that a website contributes, the greater the likelihood that Google & Bing (Yahoo) will rank your site favorably.

That said, quality content is not self generating, which is the gotcha. It requires a roadmap and accountability for execution. Take your eye off the ball and you’ll go weeks or months without any meaningful addition to the breadth of your website.  Identify and prioritize the content you are intending to develop, assign responsibility for creating it to multiple team members and hold them accountable to due dates.

Lastly, another new aspect that needs to be taken seriously is the fact that Google is now evaluating your page “load time” as a component of their algorithm. So it’s imperative that the page be constructed in a proper way.  Otherwise, the content I am encouraging you to incorporate may hold you back more than it helps you.

I spoke recently to an ex-client who is poised to do some work with us again. They were one of our first clients when we started nearly 11 years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday, sitting in their office and explaining to them what SEO was and why it was so important for their business. It was a new concept to practically everyone in 1999.

What mattered most at that time was making sure that there was sufficient content on the page for the keywords that a company was targeting and removing impediments to effective site crawling by the search engines, like Frames.

It’s interesting to see just how much SEO requirements have evolved, while also noting the degree to which they have remained consistent. Content matters more than ever; not just on-page content, but blogs, video and other collateral are now part of the essential repertoire. If you don’t produce content that speaks to a particular keyword, the likelihood of appearing prominently for the keyword is very low.

There are still site architecture issues that can be problematic for the search engines, but persistent use of Frames has all but disappeared from the landscape. It’s important to keep current on what is essential for strong SEO results, but remember that content is still at the top of the list.

Here is a no-lose suggestion for improving your website. Before I tell you what it is, I want to go a step further and actually guarantee that what I am about to share with you will work.

The idea is brilliant in it’s simplicity, yet deceivingly difficult to execute. Carrying out the idea to it’s fullest potential requires discipline, persistence and a willingness to adjust your daily routine. In all likelihood, you are not currently doing what I am going to recommend that you do.

What I am proposing… assuring you will yield favorable results is to spend time each day reading through all sections of your company’s website. It doesn’t have to be a lot of time on a daily basis, and any time is better than no time, but I have never seen a site that is un-tweakable.

Areas of potential improvement include: content that could be more effectively written, organization of content that could be more intuitive, better calls to action than currently exist and let’s not forget, trying to stamp out those broken links.

I am as remiss as anybody in this regard. If we as an organization spent more time looking at MoreVisibility.com, somehow our site would incrementally improve at a faster rate.

There is, however one minor catch to this concept…as a result to the guarantee: it’s not enough to simply identify things that need to be fixed, but you need to actually fix them right away, so that you can move on to the next improvement. The more intelligent the original structure of the site and the more flexible the CMS that powers the site, the better the chance that you will be able to rapidly (and painlessly) implement changes and boost site performance.