If you’ve been wondering how to leverage the search engines to get better online marketing results for your company, here are (at least) three things you must have
1. A Structurally-Sound Website
Like the foundation of a home, the structure of your website and the way it is coded (built) affects the success of the website as a whole.
Search engines use “spiders,” or “web crawlers” to read your website. These automated tools find, categorize, and feed pages into the search engine index. The ability of search engines to “crawl” your website and add your content to their indexes is directly impacted by the way your site is built. It has to do with html and CSS code, URLs, link quality, internal navigation and the use of images, among other things.
There are several online tools that allow you to see what the crawlers see on your website and you might be surprised by what you find.
2. Keyword-Focused Content
Think about it. The job of a search engine is to give you the most relevant content for your particular search query. The search engines do this by “reading” (using crawlers) the content on your site and categorizing it accurately. The most important content on your site is text-based, and it needs to be written around keyword phrases that most accurately describe your service or product. Mind you, it’s not about writing a bunch of keyword-packed content that only a search engine could love. Your content needs to be unique, relevant, and useful to your target audience. After all, what’s the point in getting great search results if the human beings who come to your site are turned off by your content?
In addition to text-based content, there are a number of places in a website where keyword content is helpful in SEO. URLs, image tags, page titles, metadata, and anchor text are also important. Using proven key words in this “underlayer” is a powerful way to boost your search rankings.
3. Inbound links
Yes, the search engines are charged with delivering content that is relevant to the search phrases entered, but they also want to deliver the most authoritative content available on a particular subject. When your content is deemed to be authoritative it means that other people, aside from yourself, think it is worthy of being seen and therefore have “linked” to it.
Links to your website home page and internal pages from external websites will help you build higher rankings in the search engines. But we’re not just talking about any ol’ links. Good SEO works to add high quality inbound links – the kind of links that originate from other authoritative sites. In other words, it is better to have an inbound link from a website that is related to the topic or content of your website than from one that is random. Quality matters as much as quantity.
While search engine optimization is not an exact science and there are competing beliefs and methodologies around ranking high in the search engines, our feeling is that common sense should always prevail. Trying to gain rankings by using tricks or gimmicks will not work for long, if at all, and puts you in jeopardy of being ignored by the search engines altogether. Instead, using a common sense marketing approach to building a sound website, creating great content, and attracting authority by actually BEING authoritative, is the best route to take in SEO.
Many reputable search engine marketing consultants will perform a complementary website SEO audit to assess the overall strength of your website in each of the above areas. From there, you can either fix the issues yourself or work with an outside company to help you address the problems.
As a Santa Clarita, CA-based Internet Marketing Firm, we invite you to contact us directly to request a free website audit or to learn more about SEO, download our free full-length guide, “5 Things You Must Get About SEO.”
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Posted by CristiSpahr on October 1, 2009 |
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