Educate Yourself on Search Engine Optimization Strategies

By Matthew Brown, Senior Director of Ecommerce, MarketNet

Today’s economy is in turmoil. As a result, marketing budgets are being slashed, and a major shift is occurring in the online marketing space to increase the number of targeted leads and customers via organic search marketing efforts. Look at “organic” search results as “natural” search results – i.e. the non-paid search results provided by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and many other search engines. As people use the Internet to research, it’s been proven that they look first to organic search results for information. Paid advertising links are generally utilized more when an Internet user is in more of a “buy” mode. With this in mind, let’s review five strategies that you can utilized to drive increased and targeted leads to your web site.

1. Content is EVERYTHING

When I entered into the world of online marketing over a decade ago, it was honestly very easy to “trick the system” and garner high organic results. Those days have thankfully passed. In today’s world of ever-changing search engine technology, your site is based on two factors – relevancy and authority.

To be relevant, you MUST create and maintain content on your site for the search engines to digest. As you create your content, use keywords and phrases that demonstrate your authority on the subjects you create content around – especially your services. In today’s competitive marketing environment, it is imperative that your web site performance expectations are based on activities that promote the site by itself. Strong, informative, and engaging content that can be easily indexed by search engines can show significant increases in the amount of organic traffic visiting your site. The more that your content is laden with specific keywords and phrases, the better chance your site has as being considered an “authority” and lead to increased exposure and positioning.

Developing content for your web site MUST be an ongoing process. The more updates you make to your site – the greater the chance that search engines will index (i.e. record) your site on a more frequent basis. More frequent visits for new content lends itself to the previously mentioned authority ranking. Consider creating a rolling 3-month calendar of web site content updates, and stick to that calendar as though the health of your site depends on it – as it truly does.

2. Keeping Tabs on the Competition

Gaining a full 360-view of your online marketing competition allows you insight as to certain tactics that competitors may be using, sites that they advertise on that you may not have known about, and especially to benchmark your own site against your competitors’.

On Google.com, do the following search – “link:www.mysite.com.” This will return a list of how many web pages have links directly into your site. As you look at the results, keep in mind that inbound links also lend itself to the “authority” concept mentioned above. The more inbound links you have to your site, the greater your authority rankings will increase. Now, do the same search on Google, but this time, substitute your competition’s domain name in the search criteria. Now, compare your reported inbound links to their reported inbound links. How do you measure up? While the ultimate goal is an almost endless amount of qualified inbound links, that’s not a practical strategy. Scale down your efforts so that your first objective is to meet / beat the amount of inbound links that your competition has. You may in fact find that many of their inbound links are a perfect match for your site to be listed on as well.

Keep in mind that Google is reportedly throwing out inbound links from their database between 9-12 months old. This is good from both a relevancy and authority standpoint, but it does make your job more challenging – as you (or your outsourced SEO company) are the one that must diligently and frequently obtain new links.

3. Gain Future Trending Insights

You probably have a good idea as to what content belongs on your site today from an informative and useful perspective, but what about addressing content for FUTURE needs? Google has recently released a tool that can help you gather trend data on not only keywords and phrases that are hot now, but more importantly, the keywords and phrases that are related and usage on the rise. Point your browser to http://www.google.com/insights/search, and begin the process by entering a keyword or phrase that is related to your business. You can actually add multiple keywords and phrases, and I would encourage you to do so to maximize opportunity visibility.

Once you’ve entered your search terms, click the “Search” button. Google will take a few seconds to pull information from its database, and then refresh the screens with its findings. The first item you will notice is a line graph that displays search usage trends over time. Secondarily, a report is displayed that shows the regional demand for said search keywords and terms. This is an area that you can drill down into further to increase insight into your specific region. Now, for the juicy stuff!

At the bottom of the report, you have two columns – “Top Searches” and “Rising Searches.” The Top Searches result set displays keywords and phrases related to your original search terms. This gives you an idea of what is working for people searching for content today. To gain a glimpse of what users are looking at from a go-forward perspective, look at the data returned under the “Rising Searches” dataset. In this area, Google is actually providing additional related keywords and phrases, but with an emphasis on the increased search patterns emerging in the trailing 30 days. You should utilize this valuable and FREE data to insure that your go-forward content efforts are headed in the direction that people are searching by.

4. Content Distribution

If you’re using this article as a guide, you’ve now given thought to beefing up your site content, creating a rolling content calendar (and sticking to it), and have used research tools to understand where your competition appears online, as well as gained visibility into the emerging keyword and phrases that directly affect your content structure. Pat yourself on the back – good job! But we’re not done . . .

It’s one thing to have content on your own web site, but it’s a whole new world when you promote this content from outside of your site. Social media sites such as Mixx.com, Buzz.Yahoo.com, Digg.com, Facebook.com and MANY others are free sites that allow you to post your content for users to view – users that might not have seen your offerings or services any other way. As you expand your content distribution, you end up gaining more inbound links, spreading your reach beyond your site, and attracting new visitors to your business.

As you look to begin distributing your content on social media sites, it’s imperative that you have a basic understanding of how they work. What they are not designed to do is appear to be a bulletin board for press releases. Social media sites are all about “community” – you and the readers make up that community. For a community to work, there must be conversations taking place – which your content can facilitate. Beyond the actual posting of content to social media sites, I would encourage you to embrace these networks and see what further value you can provide to the community. The feedback you end up receiving, and the dialogs about your content, are opportunities that many marketers just dream about.

In closing, I’d like to point out that search engine optimization can be heavily influenced by the content you provide online, as well as the content that you distribute off-site. But here’s the best thing about the strategies identified above – they’re all FREE. Your commitment comes into play from a time and quality standpoint. With those two items in mind, and the strategies outlined above, you will be well on your way to improved search rankings in no time.

2008 MarketNet. All rights reserved.