Content Freshness
It’s no mystery – search engines such as Google and Bing LOVE fresh content. This is one reason blogs have become so popular with larger businesses. They are easy to update and to update frequently. You don’t have to write the next Iliad, but you do want your content to be readable. That is to say, you don’t want to just write content for search engines, but you want to write them to be read. Sure, it’s wise to include search engine friendly keywords that you’ve researched thoroughly, but that need not be the focus. Don’t have the time? You can hire someone else to do it for you for a nominal fee. Whatever you do, make sure you are updating your content regularly!
Social Media
What do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have in common? People are on them talking about businesses just like yours right now. Not worried about attracting new customers and monitoring your brand through Social Media? Well, what if I told you that search engines such as Google use Social Media to weigh the organic search results. Now that’s social proof. You should be using Social Media to Social Media to streamline your sales, marketing, public relations, and customer service and to energize your business’s online presence.
Onsite Optimization
Onsite optimization are those things that you can do on your website. This includes your sites navigation, content, and design. The right mix of keywords, phrases, meta tags, headings, descriptions and html tags throughout the website content to create relevancy, easy crawling and better indexing. This means few onsite standards and best practices need to be followed in order to make a website search engine friendly. This typically is the first step in the website’s optimization process. [Expert Tip: Make sure to conduct a speed test through Google. I rarely, if ever, see an Internet marketing or SEO company take this necessary step.]
External Links
The more sites linking back on keywords (also called link backs or back links) to your site increase popularity and ranking. Hence, submissions to external sites help in link building increasing the Google placement and authority. Social Media posts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube can also create back links, though not all are known as “dofollow” links. The process of building external links is time sensitive, frustrating and confusing. But this ultimately, helps in creating higher search engine rankings. Link building is among the top tasks required for keyword ranking and search traffic success. Beware of “black hat” techniques as these will get you in trouble with Google and could result in your website being banned from their search results.
Local Listings
The majority of online searches are individuals searching for local products and services (around 80%). Consumers use location based keywords to find businesses closer to their zip codes to follow up with a call or a visit to buy offline. Business listings created on local search engines, maps, and online directories create a good local search optimization strategy generating targeted local traffic. Even though about 52% of the consumers use location in their search like, ‘Santa Barbara Fitness’, ‘Montecito Personal Trainer‘ etc. Google uses IP address (your computer’s address) to target the location of the search request to serve the results around that area. If you’re not on local, you’re missing the boat!
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