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10 SEO Tips

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Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most crucial component of effective SEO. Choose the wrong keywords, get the wrong results. You need to look for keywords that are targeted to your business, actually get searched for and aren’t overly competitive. Keyword research tools are helpful because they help make you more efficient.

That being said, always first use your brain to come up with a list of keywords you think someone would use to find your product or service...and then plug them into a keyword tool to see the full picture. You should also look for keywords with commercial intent i.e. direct mail versus direct mail company.

Action Tip: Look for keywords that

are targeted, have search volume, aren't ultra competitive and have commercial intent.

Tags

Optimizing your tags helps the search engines understand what your website pages are about. Don’t force them to guess. Tell them with your tags. The three tags to pay attention to include title, description and image alt. For title and description, you want to include your keywords but you also have to “sell the click” since these two tags are typically used by Google in the SERPs. You have to find the right balance between optimized and readable – don’t keyword stuff. The alt tag needs to describe the image – again, don’t keyword stuff.

Action Tip: Make sure your title

tags, description tags and alt tags are optimized for your keywords, but don’t keyword stuff.

Content

Your content needs to be relevant to the keywords you are trying to optimize that specific page for. For example, you can’t rank for “red widget services” if your content is focused on “why widgets are red”. One free tool to utilize to see if your content is on the right track is http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html. If this tool shows you that your content is about the keywords you’re trying to optimize for, you’re doing good. But remember not to spam – your content still needs to convert visitors into leads.

Action Tip: The content you have

on your website pages has to be relevant to the keywords you want to rank for.

Press Releases

Online press release can be a source of links for your website, but more importantly, they can be used to generate exposure and hopefully interest in your company. One effective strategy is to write a really good piece of content for your website and promote it with a press release so more people are aware of it. The extra eyeballs for your content could result in some links naturally. Two rock solid press release distribution platforms are PRweb and Marketers Media.

Action Tip: Use online press

releases to promote both your company and your quality content.

Link Building

As of right now, links to your website are still one of the most important rankings factors. The search engines view a link to your website as a “vote”. The more “votes” your website has, usually the higher it ranks. That being said, the quality and relevancy of the websites that link to you is crucial. With link building, if you follow “quality over quantity” and “manual over automation”, you’ll be in good shape.

Rock solid link building opportunities include manual blog commenting on industry related blogs, guest posting, unlinked brand mentions, resource pages and online PR (both press release distribution and mingling with the media to get links from their stories).

Action Tip: Build links manually that

give you both SEO value and the potential for referral traffic.

Your Site

Blogging

Quality, fresh content via blogging is the cornerstone of both SEO and website marketing in general. The more unique content you have on your website that is engaging and useful, typically the more traffic you’ll get from both the search engines and social media networks. Reason being, every new page of content you add to your website is one new “doorway” that someone can enter to visit your website. If you write unique content and promote it, there’s a good chance Google is going to eventually send traffic to it. And if the content you write is really engaging, it will get shared in the social media world, further accelerating the amount of visibility and exposure you receive.

Action Tip: If you don’t have a blog,

start one! If you have one, strategize on how you can make it better.

Traffic Analytics

How effective is your SEO strategy? You won’t know unless you’re tracking your traffic. Google Analytics is one of the more robust and free programs available, but good alternatives include Open Tracker and Clicky. While it’s true that Google blocks keyword data when searchers are signed into a Google property (labeled as “not provided” in analytics), at the rawest form, you can track how much organic traffic you’re getting from the search engines month after month to make sure there’s an upward trend.

And don’t forget about referral traffic. If you’re doing link building right and building links for both SEO and traffic, you should see your link building efforts sending some referral traffic to your website. Meaning, people are clicking on the links you are building to your website.

Action Tip: Track your traffic to

make sure your organic search traffic is moving in an upward trend.

Social Media

The line between social media and SEO is very blurred now. Websites that rank high tend to have more social media activity. It doesn’t mean that you can rank high by tweeting a lot, for example. But it does mean that social media is a piece of the website marketing pie that influences ranking. Why? Because Google’s job is to show quality websites in their SERPs. And quality websites are usually very active in social media and get a lot of people sharing the product, service or content in social media.

At the very least, social media marketing will make your company more visible. And this online visibility could result in a number of positive things like connections, opportunities and links back to your website.

Action Tip: Become active on social

media to boost online visibility, build connections and increase eyeballs for your content.

Google Plus

Google Plus can’t be ignored and there’s so many reasons to actively participate. If you’re a local business, make sure your Google Plus local page is optimized. If you’re a business with more of a national reach, make sure your Google Plus business page is optimized. And all individuals should have a Google Plus profile page because it enables you to network socially with others and you can also setup Authorship which helps signal to Google that you are the author of your content. Lastly, include the +1 button on your website because it’s an easy way to enable visitors to share your content throughout the growing Google Plus network.

Action Tip: Get started with Google

Plus by signing up and also throwing the +1 button on your website.

Engagement

Google has a healthy amount of data on how engaged visitors are with your website. For example, if they see a click that goes from their SERPs to your website and then bounces back to their SERPs, they know the visitor was likely unhappy with what they saw. This goes against their mission of showing quality websites in their SERPs.

The bottom line is you need a website that engages with your visitor. You want visitors browsing around your website and this is accomplished by having a website that is very usable, interesting and optimized for relevant keywords. Besides this resulting in healthy SEO metrics, it helps with converting more visitors into leads, which is really the whole point.

Action Tip: Use an outside service

to analyze your website from a usability and conversion optimization point-of-view.