Four SEO Strategies for Your Business

There are a million guides out there to SEO, but we’ve distilled four great SEO strategies to help you achieve your web and Internet marketing goals in 2012.

1. Determine Your Keywords

Know your keywords! Every person at your organization involved in marketing, particularly the CEO/President (as much as you may not like technology!) must know:

1. What Keywords Are/Why They’re Important
2. What Keywords You Rank For And Provide Value to Your Business
3. What Keywords You’re Trying to Rank Higher For

Many businesses put up a website without thinking about the keywords they need to rank for. This process starts from the very beginning – your business name even affects your search engine rankings! For example, if you’re called “Bonita Bikes, LLC” and your domain is bonitabikes.com – odds are you’re going to rank well when people search for “bikes in Bonita” or “bonita bikes”.

Looking to do your own quick research? 

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool External  is a good start to generate ideas on what terms people are searching for when searching for your business type.

This will show you how many searches were conducting locally and worldwide. One of the major factors in getting the most SEO juice from the organic listings, meaning non paid listings is to find the specific,  what is referred to as “long tail keywords” that are search phrases that are very specific to the exact thing that the searcher is looking for and create articles and blog posts that include these exact terms in your content on your site.

For example if I were a chiropractor in Naples Florida and wanted to target people looking for relief from back pain instead of just having words on my site such as Naples Chiropractor which is too general, I would use the keyword tool and look for 3-5 word search terms related to back pain such as back pain treatment options or treatment techniques for back pain or alternative treatments for back injuries. When you come up with some ultra specific search terms such as these you can then create your web content to directly address these issues through your web content. With just a few well written blog posts or articles of 400-700 words explaining these phrases you can easily end up in the top 5 search results on Google and bump your competition onto the second and third pages of the search results on Google and dominate in your local market.

2. Local is Important – So is Social

Have you done a search at Google (or any search engine recently). Most likely you’ve seen 3 kinds of results (if not more)… General Search Engine Results, Paid Listings, and Local Listings. In many cases, and for nearly ALL searches for local goods/products/services Local results are actually larger, and more prominent than the good old fashioned results. The point is – you need to tell the search engines about your LOCAL BUSINESS – add your information, and in particular your address/location. We’ve provided links below…

Social Networks

Like it or not. Social networks are here to stay.  Every business should consider at a minimum claiming their business listings on the following sites:

• Google business listing: www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter
• Yahoo:http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
• Bing : http://www.bing.com/local/
• Yelp: http://www.yelp.com
• Merchant Circle: http://www.merchantcircle.com/signup/
• Yellow Pages: http://www.yellowpages.com
• Facebook Fan pages: http://www.Facebook.com

3. Links Are UNBELIEVABLY Important

What is a link (or backlink)?

A link is when another site features a link to yours. This is a link (that goes to Google.com).

Links play a huge role in helping search engines understand what’s going on. They are essentially a vote of confidence. Much like a radio dj that talks about a product or service, or a friend that recommends a great burger joint, a link represents an endorsement.

The more links you have (and we’re abbreviating a lot of details here) the better.

But, that’s not all – relevant websites links help a lot – as do more “powerful/large” website links. They play a big role in helping boosting your search engine ranking on Google especially if the links come from relevant sites that are high quality and have a lot of good content closely related to your sites content. The most common ways to start to build more high quality backlinks is by first having high quality content on your site that other website owners see as beneficial to their readers and giving you the thumbs up as they link to the articles and other content on your site. Another great technique is to network with other website owners that have similar audience profiles and interests and offer to write informative articles that can be posted on their site.

If they agree this is a win/win for both you and the site owner as it adds great content to their site thus attracting more traffic, and it gives you a high quality backlink and traffic to your site that results from piggybacking off their traffic. Also finding industry authority sites and adding value through value added comments with your website address in the signature part of your post will help you build more and more backlinks over time.

4. Site Structure

Every day the search engine spiders scour the internet and all the websites looking for new content that is on a site. One of the biggest mistakes made with sites is that the website when it was set up was not configured correctly in terms of the search engine spiders being able to find and categorize the main topics of the site. Many times it is just a matter of making sure that the title tags, meta descriptions, and picture descriptions are labeled correctly so that when Google visits your site it can read it correctly and give you the correct Search Engine Optimized credit for having a well laid out site.

For a Free Customized Website review that will give you a great analysis of your website, send us a message.