Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the use of various strategies for the purpose of causing a given website to rank higher in search engine results. As a business owner, you want as much exposure of your company as you can get. In today’s marketplace it is absolutely essential to have a relevant website that showcases who you are as a company and causes customers to purchase your products and services. However, even more importantly than just having a website, you need people to visit your website. It doesn’t matter how beautifully your website is designed or how well it presents your products and services if you have no inbound traffic to your site. This is what search engine optimization is all about: delivering the most traffic possible to your website by making sure it ranks at the top of the list in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The outcome sounds simple enough; however, the process of achieving effective SEO is a complicated one that includes a variety of methods. When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, you need someone with knowledge and experience of the following strategies:
Building Optimized Content
The first and perhaps most important part of SEO is in the creation of good, searchable content for your website that contains appropriate keywords and phrases. An important part of writing good content is in understanding how search engines operate and how to write content that will be best recognized. Basically, when you upload content to your website, search engines send a “crawler” to read and save information such as keywords from your page to be indexed. That information is stored on the search engine’s servers where it can be easily accessed. What makes SEO complicated is that big search engines like Google are constantly changing and updating the way they search and rank pages. This is why SEO depends on many factors and not just searchable content alone.
Backlinking
The term backlinking, in regard to SEO, refers to the placement of links that lead to your website on other websites around the web. Search engines rank your webpage higher if there are many other sites linking to your website. The prominence of the website which contains a link to your site is the key factor when it comes to backlinking. For instance, it won’t help your rank to have thousands of spamming sights that contain links to your website. Google will rank your sight higher if you have links to your sight from other well respected sites.
Tracking Results
It is very important, when optimizing your website for search engines, that you keep an eye on what is working and what isn’t. Because SEO is such a dynamic practice, it requires constant vigilance to keep up with changes in the way search engines operate. A good search engine optimizer has to evaluate the results of his work in order to change and adapt as needed for optimal results. SEOs use special tools to track keyword performance and rankings, amount of actual organic search traffic, conversion rates, unique search terms driving traffic, etc. Without tracking your real world performance, there is no way to tell if you are really making a difference with your SEO plan or not.
List Building
List building is another great tactic to get actual paying customers to your website. If you have ever made a purchase on a major website, you were probably asked to register or opt in to receive emails containing sales and promotions. This is known as list building, or building a customer list or database. Companies know that if you are a satisfied customer and freely choose to opt in for promotional emails, there is a good chance you will buy from them again. This is perhaps the most reliable way to get repeat customers who are far more likely to purchase your products than a random web surfer.
Video Marketing
One form of marketing which is quickly becoming the most popular is video marketing via video sharing sites such as Youtube. In the fast-paced world we live in today, most people just don’t have time or are simply uninterested in reading a long block of text on a website. Companies are quickly realizing that it is far more effective to convert text into a short 3-5 minute video explaining their services with helpful images and voiceover narration. These videos can then be easily shared via social media, linking through twitter, or plugging the video in on a home page. The possibilities are vast when it comes to video marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Unbelievable opportunities are available when it comes to social media marketing of your business. Facebook reports that it now has 1.11 billion people using the site each month. With that many users sharing and networking voluntarily, the site is a dream come true for marketing yourself. Many companies are finding it easier to get a following on their company Facebook page and then link people into their main website from there. There are also plenty of other popular social media sites that businesses are reaping the benefits of such as Instagram, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Yelp just to name a few.
PPC Marketing (Pay Per Click)
Pay per click marketing involves paying a search engine or even another website to host an ad for your business for which you will pay a certain amount whenever a web surfer clicks the ad and is led to your website. So let’s say www.example.com agrees to put your banner ad on their website. You then agree to pay them $0.02 per unique click on your ad. If your ad receives no clicks, you pay nothing. This is obviously a sure way to see that you are getting clickthroughs to your website; however, it can cost you a good bit of money if you are getting a lot of clicks so it’s good to track how many of those clicks are actually leading to a purchase.
On-page and Off-page SEO Techniques
SEO as a whole includes a wide array of methods, some within your website (on-page), and some promoting your page through other means (off-page).
Some on-page strategies include:
· Optimization of title, description, and paragraph heading tags
· Optimization of image names and title tags
· Making all site URLs search engine friendly
· Writing quality content of at least 500 words per page
· Making all navigation crawlable by search engine robots
· Internal linking of pages within your website
· Placing external links to other prominent websites on your page
· Geo-Tagging
· Optimizing your site’s robots.txt file
Some off-page SEO techniques to draw traffic to your site include:
· Blogging
· Forum posting
· Social networking
· Link exchange and cross-linking
· Classifieds submission
· Article submission
· Ads in local listings like Yellow Pages
· Press releases
· Video promotions online or television spots
· Widget/gadget development
Now that you see the benefits of search engine optimization, you can see how important it is to have knowledgeable and experienced SEOs taking care of your company website. Let us put your mind at ease when it comes to your website marketing strategy. We not only provide initial optimization for a new website, we will also assess an existing website and re-optimize and enhance it for the best search engine performance possible. Our experienced optimizers know how to use the most up to date SEO methods to provide your company with the high search engine rankings you’ve been looking for. Contact us today!
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