When it comes to search engine optimization, most people
think of it as some kind of religious cult where members speak in tongues,
intoning such mantras as “SERPS,” “Meta Data,” “Linkbait,” and “AJAX,” as
though they were trying somehow to transmute lead into gold. Worst of all, there is so much conflicting
data out there regarding the ever changing world of SEO that keeping current is
almost a full time job in itself. Add to
this the fact that no sooner do you get a bead on what the search engines want,
when they up and change their algorithm (as Google recently did with their Penguin
Update), making the analogy to sorcery even more poignant as your listing
disappears like a puff of smoke. So, if you don’t want to have to start the process from
scratch every time the search engines decide to do a little spring cleaning,
this is what you need to know:
1. Stop
trying to please the search engine spiders and work on pleasing your audience
instead. In the good old days before
the turn of the century, many SEO experts would generate page one results by
stuffing their homepages with as many keywords as possible. Some would even take this to the extreme, by
generating nonsense paragraphs using white text that more or less guaranteed
that they would have higher keyword saturation than the competition. While this tactic may have worked back in
1999, today’s spiders are trained to flag keyword spamming, along with other black
hat techniques as link farms. Besides, who wants to read a website
that is nearly unintelligible? If you
really want to score points with both the search engines and your readers, start
creating better content on a regular basis that engages, educates and intrigues
your audience.
2. Having a
blog isn’t the same thing as blogging. If your idea of a blog is to write an
occasional paragraph about your business that would make the minutes of your
next board meeting seem animated by comparison, then you really don’t
understand what blogging is all about.
The best way to maximize your blogging results is to generate weekly
installments that solve problems, provide insight and/or provoke a reaction. Properly employed, blogging can be one of the
best ways to increase your audience, create backlinks and get on page one of
search engines. (Note: Google is gaga
for blogs. A properly optimized blog
will many times wind up on page one of the world’s most popular search engine
in as little as 24 hours.) If you repost
your best blogging efforts on article posts, zines and other blogs then you
will not only create an opportunity for your blog to go viral, but you will
also enhance your SEO at the same time.
4. How social are your social networks? Social networking is again another free
marketing tool that makes your web presence 100% interactive and sticky. Just as with blogs, social networks are only
useful if you feed them on a regular basis.
This doesn’t mean that you have to write a blogpost a day to succeed online. But you also don’t want to post only now and
then. Especially with timeline driven
social networks like Facebook, having long gaps between posts is not likely to
help you build readership. One tip to
making the job of feeding the social nets less of a chore is to link or repost
your blogs on your social networks. Make
sure the posts have links and offers embedded at the bottom of the post. This way you will kill two SEO birds with one
stone.
5. How many websites should your company have? (Note: the correct answer is never one.) Four or five years ago, the consensus was
that all a company needed to do was create one website chock full of as many
pages that described the business as they could generate. Back then it was hoped that someone arriving
from a search engine query would click around the site for ten minutes or so in
order to determine if they should do business with you.
Today, the average website visit
lasts less than 2 minutes. More
importantly, if a visitor has to click onto a subsidiary page in order to find
the item they seek, the next click you will hear will be the prospect clicking
back to the search engine for a new search. Heck, it's next to impossible to get web surfers to scroll beneath the fold nowadays. To give your business a competitive edge, you need to look at a search engine query as a question and the
website or landing page as the answer.
If you want to maximize not only your SEO potential, but also your
conversions as well, then you need to research the keywords and phrases that
correspond to your business and create a number of landing pages that contain a
video, text and offer related to each keyword or phrase.
What it takes to cast an SEO spell
While it doesn’t necessarily take eye of newt to get the
magic formula right, what it does take is
imagination, interaction and persistence if you are going to make the Tao of
SEO resonate for your business.
Carl Weiss is
president of W Squared Media Group, a company that specializes in putting client
websites on steroids. Carl also operates
http://jacksonville-video-production.com
a cutting edge viral video production facility.
Carl can be heard live every Tuesday at 4pm Eastern on http://blogtalkradio.com/workingthewebtowin
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