Search Engine Optimization Tips

I just returned from beautiful Destin, Florida,  feeling relaxed and ready to blog again. Has it really been a week? Time flies!

In my Success Made Easy - Five Simple Steps newsletter article I talk about knowing who you are and what you are good at. To do what you love and make money, many times you have to take risks and go out on your own.

I did it and now many friends and family members are venturing out as well. Of course, #2 in my newsletter article says know who you are not. They are not marketers. So, who do they call? You guessed it.

And what is the most commonly asked question? "How do I set up my website so it is found by the search engines?" A twenty minute conversation ensues where I am rambling on and on while the person on the other line is writing furiously.

I am certainly not an expert, but I do know the basics. So, instead of making you write furiously, I thought I would capture my basic recommendations in this post...

1. Pick your theme song
Or, in this case, your theme keyword phrase. The best way to figure this out is to use WordTracker. Plug in every keyword and keyword phrase you can think of. WordTracker will feed you the terms people actually use, the number of searches, and the number of websites competing for these searches.

Pick a keyword phrase you will use to optimize your entire site - and then pick several you will use to optimize specific content pages.

2. Measure twice, cut once
Many companies - big brand names and small start ups - create the website first and then go back and optimize it. Many times these same companies are forced to spend even more money to redevelop their site because it was not built correctly the first time. Do your keyword research upfront, ensure your web development partner understands SEO basics, and then develop the site.

Include your keywords in the title tag, meta tags, and H1 tags. As you write your content add your keyword phrase 3-4 times. Include keyword phrase text links throughout your site pointing to other content rich pages. And, most importantly, include a link from your homepage to a site map or store directory page with every single page in your site linked by keyword rich text links. Much like the Caro Consulting site map.

3. Enter the popularity contest
All search engines feel a quality website, with quality content are linked to by many other quality websites. The most linked to or "most popular" website is given the highest rank and in most cases, listed on the first page of the search results for that relevant keyword or keyword phrase.

With good content, this happens over time. To speed things up, you can do the following:

• Contact similar websites, tell them about your great content, and ask if they would mind linking to a particular page in your website using a keyword rich text link.
• Create a blog. You will notice in my blog, every once in a while I link back to specific pages on my website. Blogs are also a great way to create valuable content, reinforce your brand, and get to know your customers and prospects on a more personal level.
• Comment on relevant blog posts. Do not promote yourself or your solution, you will be flamed. Provide valuable insight and then let your signature do the linking for you.
• Write keyword rich press releases with interesting information and post them on PRWeb. This provides more valuable content for your website, links back to your site, and ideally garners some media pick up.

As you can tell, this takes a lot of time and effort. Going back to recommendation #2, know who you are not, if you are not the type of person who wants to dig in and get this done, hire someone to do this for you. There are search engine optimization companies for every budget.

Have more questions? Give me a call, I'd be happy to ramble on and on!

Comments

[Dave Williams, Chief Strategist, 360i]

Teresa,

Great points above! Another great first step is to register the site with all major directories - Yahoo, DMOZ, and all major second tier directories. These will provide immediate relevance to the site for search marketing results based on the volume of quality inbound links that these will provide. Also, an important thing to keep in mind when creating the link is that the anchor text of the link is optimized for your important keywords. The anchor text of the link plays a key role in Google's algorithm as it relates to relevancy and ultimately search results. So, a link from a great site with extremely relevant anchor text (such as Search Marketing Consulting Services for a search marketing consultancy) will help a site achieve high rank for this specific term within the major engines. This is it for now as I could go on for hours on this topic and other tactics. The main point here is to not underestimate the importance of links, especially for NEW web sites! Take advantage of all available directories. Yours truly, Dave Williams, 360i

[Stacy Williams]

TC, great job of boiling down a very complex subject. I'd also suggest for search term research, adding Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (fka Overture) data to Wordtracker's. None of these three sources of data are perfect, but when taken together, you can start to see trends you can rely on in terms of which terms are really more frequently used.

Also, pay attention to how competitive each term is. If Google returns 20 million other web pages for a particular query, it's not likely that your site (particularly a new site) will be able to beat out that many competitors.

Hope that helps - Stacy

[Joe Koufman]

Great "primer" for those thinking of launching a web site. It says something that two top experts in the SEO/SEM space gave feedback to this blog entry. Way to go Teresa! - Joe