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tips to improve search engine visibility

by marketing team in news/smaller.stronger.faster., thoughts at 8:05 am

- There are 4 billion mobile phones in use and 1.08 billion of them are smart phones.

- By 2014, mobile internet should take over desktop internet usage.

- Half of all local searches are performed on mobile devices.

- On average, Americans spend 2.7 hours per day socializing on their phones. That’s 2x the amount of time they are eating and a third of the time they are sleeping!

- 200 Million YouTube views occur on mobile devices every day

(source: Microsoft.com)

What do these few stats tell you? There are a lot of people out there who have a lot of access to a lot of information – and you want access to that audience.

here are 10 tips to improve search engine visibility.

 
1. get optimized: have a digital marketing professional with search engine marketing experience, optimize your existing website for search (seo). this includes: analyzing the content for “keywords” relevant to your site’s subject matter, reviewing/editing header tags and descriptions, creating an xml site map and submitting it to google, bing, yahoo and ask.com.

 

2. use keywords: search engines analyze the content on your website to see that it matches what people are searching for. this analysis is about finding “relevance”. other sites in your industry will be using terms or language similar to yours, so in essence, you are competing for attention from search engines, and thus, competing for the same “search terms”. research the most competitive keywords that define your industry. if there is too much competition (i.e. there are millions of searches on a particular topic or word), you may want to consider adding pay-per-click (ppc) campaigns (such as adwords) to the marketing mix. this will help to distinguish your site by allowing you to get premium positioning at the top or the right of search page results.

 

3. use analytics: tools like google analytics, generate information on how traffic is arriving at and interacting with your web pages. these reports can be extremely helpful when making future marketing decisions, site updates and are key to monitoring the effectiveness of your seo campaign. you can create a free account at www.google.com/analytics, once signed up, you can generate analytics code (a snippet of javascript code) and add it to your website’s html code. the result of this is the ability to accurately measure your site’s traffic activity.

 

4. get listed: if you have a local business with a physical address, make sure you get your business description and location information on google “places” and any other social media outlet that allows you to identify and geotag your business such as yelp, facebook, and foursquare. the result of this is the creation of additional relevance when search engine algorithms are drawing relationships between your site and the other places on the web claiming to be “related” to you.

 

5. find directories: get your website on as many business/professional searches as possible. citysearch and yelp are free resources that can help to boost your search engine relevance. the important thing to remember here is that your company descriptions and content has to be consistent so that your brand identity is synchronized across all digital properties.

 

6. leverage partnerships: if you work with partner businesses, develop a “resources” page on your website and list your partners and their url. ask your partners to list you on theirs as well. the more reciprocal “back links” you build (especially to larger websites with more traffic) the more search engines will “trust” your content as being authentic, and thus be relevant to the person searching.

 

7. create content: make sure your blog has a custom url, (i.e. it should not read www.yourblog.wordpress.com). use your blog to write keyword rich (i.e. industry buzz words) content. don’t go overboard with the amount of keywords so that it just comes across as jargon. the point of blogging is not only to create content, but to also position yourself as a “subject matter expert (sme)”. people commenting on your blog posts also tips off the search engine that other people are finding your content useful.

 

8. smart blog titles: we’ve been watching the search marketing space evolve and are fascinated by how the iphones new application “siri” is going to impact the space. people are now able to search via iphone’s question format. we feel pretty strongly that this is going to change the way people search for content in the future, so, make sure your content titles are as significant as the content found within. we’re pretty excited to see how it affects the industry, because it could be yet another apple game changer.

 

9. socialize: make sure that your business has a presence on facebook, twitter, digg, linkedin and yelp. these are great places to start to develop your brand’s social profile. depending on the type of business you have: myspace, flickr, and stumbleupon may also help capture the attention of your specific audience. make sure that you  syndicate your blog posts on both twitter and facebook. there are tools you can integrate to help make this an easy and seamless process.

 

10. integrate video: youtube now gives power to seo by not only placing videos on the video tab on google search results, but becoming a trusted resource for finding information in regular searches, on mobile devices and personal computers. your video titles and descriptions should always include relevant keywords. fact: youtube is the number two search engine, behind google.

 

search engine optimization (seo) requires ongoing monitoring and management. google and other search engines are  constantly changing search algorithms and features to improve the accuracy of the results they offer, so, you have to continue monitoring and adjusting strategies to keep it all in sync.  want more? feel free to contact us for a consultation.