SEO “Best Practices”
DIGITAL CLARITY: Applying basic search engine optimization concepts by Brandy Woolford
SEO is essential to a websites ability to drive traffic and ultimately increase customer acquisition. SEO can be accomplished through two ways, pay-per-click advertising organic SEO strategies. According to the article, some researchers believe people are ten times more likely to click on organic search results rather than paid ads. This only makes sense because people want results most relevant to their search terms and also don’t appreciate companies pushing them to buy things. Just think of the last time you actually clicked on a banner ad. Can you even remember? SEO drives 75% of all web traffic, so clearly marketers are using SEO tools to increase their page rank.
As Google’s mantra states: content is king. Driving page rank organically starts with website design. Google’s algorithm analyzes words, phrases, and hyperlinks within the website. Of particular importance are headers and words at the beginnings of paragraphs, so choosing those strategically is imperative to having unique yet popular word usage.
One method of increasing a site’s page rank organically is through blogging and the use of social media sites. Having a blog for your company will not only create a place where members can interact, but by writing blogs that people are interested in, people will appreciate the contribution of useful information and may even follow a link to your company’s home page. Also, you can create blog posts on other relevant online communities where product users may browse, so members may come across one of your blogs and see a hyperlink to your home site and click through. When Google analyzes the blog page, it will pick up any hyperlinks to your page. However, writing posts with too many hyperlinks to your company may be seen as an employee merely attempting to drive traffic rather than genuinely contribute content. Therefore, appropriate hyperlink frequency and labeling is important to remaining a credible source of information. You can view one of my blogs here.
Strategic link placement is also very important. Having links within your website to other microsites will increase your ranking, as will your URL being located on other websites, especially popular ones. Link sharing is another method of increasing your page rank. Google does not love this method, but by using particular websites, you can search for relevant website and send them an invitation to share links. After they agree, you both paste each other’s link on a hidden website that only website administrators are able to view. However, Google’s recently changed algorithm may diminish the effectiveness of this guerilla SEO tactic.
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing