5S is a Japanese tradition of workplace/household management. It is a list of five Japanese words – seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke. When transliterated in English, they all begin with a ‘S’ and hence they are termed as 5S. I had always known these principles but I never paid much attention to it until a few days ago. While I was at a local store, I saw a poster highlighting the 5S principle of management and I found that the principles hold true even in our search engine optimizaton projects. So much so that when I came back to office this Monday I re-educated my team mates about SEO with these principles in mind. Here is how we can use the 5S principle of management for setting up an efficient and effective SEO campaign.
The Principle Of 5S As Applied To SEO
Seiri (Tidiness) In SEO
- Check your website for pages with duplicate content
- Remove duplicate pages OR use a Canonical URL tag
- If you are running an eCommerce or listing website and the pages have expired, remove them and make it 404.
Seiton (Arranging) In SEO
- Make sure your most important pages like – Contact Us, Serviceable Area, FAQs, etc. appear in your global navigation menu.
- Structure your pages – make them as sub-pages of relevant top level pages and/or arrange them in proper categories
- If you got pages in your heirarchy that you believe are considered irrelevant by your users, remove them or put them in a different page heirarchy
Seiso (Cleaning And Inspecting) In SEO
- Make sure all your important pages are indexable, are having unique meta tags and are properly linked from your website
- Clean-up your page’s URL structure and ensure that the URL structure contains your target keyword
- Inspect your website’s load time
Seiketsu (Maintaining) In SEO
- Ensure that you provide valuable information to your website visitors
- Make use of tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to ensure that you understand your visitors well and are aware of any technical issues that might negatively affect your website rankings
Shitsuke (Cultivating) In SEO
- Ensure that your website users are able to provide their feedback and connect with you
- Socialize with your website users and prospect
- Spread awareness about your website/business on social networks