Search Engine Optimization 101

The topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a broad one, but if you happen to be your company's webmaster, there are some simple strategies you can apply to improve your ranking in non-paid search. (It also helps if you have a bit of an understanding when working with web development firms.) 

Search
SEO firms go through your site and build strategies for on-page SEO (keywords and content) and off-page SEO (links and social media). The most important concept is that search engines read text in HTML. Which means if you have a beautiful flash site, it may be invisible in search if there is no text to read.  You can check this by right clicking in your browser on the home page of your website and selecting "view source."  You now see what the search engine sees.

The more words you have relevant to a given search term, the higher you come up in search. For example, if your company’s name is “This Amazing Company” then the more times you say the term “This Amazing Company” in your content the more relevant you become to the search term “This Amazing Company”. 

With that in mind, search engines prioritize the words in titles of pages with the home page being the most important. So, if your home page is simply titled “This Amazing Company – Home” you are missing the opportunity to reach people who may be searching for “your service + your city.” A simple fix is to change the title of the home page to “This Amazing Company – these services in your city.” (My guess is that you can be more creative than that.) Search engines also care that you have unique titles for the different pages on your website. 

Another opportunity is to add keywords in your footer. If your company’s address is in the footer of each page, then your city suddenly shows up on your website…a lot. You may choose to add a sentence on other things people may search for where you would like to show up in the rankings. Page descriptions are another under-utilized item. You can write the content that comes up in the preview of your page by adding a "description" metatag. In HTML, it looks something like this: 

<head> 
<title> This Amazing Company | a service provider in Your City</title> 
<meta name="description" content="This Amazing Company is passionate about connecting people and doing wonderful things in our community. We can help you with this service, this service and this service."> 
<meta name="keywords" content="amazing company, your city, community, wonderful things” > 

When you first make changes, it isn’t unusual to get a bump in how high you show up in natural search, and while you may mistakenly attribute that to the brilliance of the changes you’ve made; more likely, it is because the page was “fresh.” It isn’t unusual to check back on that search term in a few months to find you’ve fallen in the rankings. Search engines are much more interested in recent content than older content, so the “freshness” of your pages actually matters. Structuring your website in a way where new content is added frequently makes a big difference. 

Off page SEO is a bit trickier to pull off.  The big idea is that search engines assume that the more sites that reference yours the more important your site is; so it pushes you higher in the rankings. While there are all types of tricks to influence this, one of the best ways is to simply create content that others want to reference. 

Google has some fantastic tools which can read your site and provide feedback on things as detailed as the most used keywords on your site and duplicate titles of pages. Check outhttp://www.google.com/webmasters/ and begin to explore. 

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Many thanks to Mark MacDonald at PinPoint Creative Group who inspired me to do my homework on such things! 

 

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INFOGRAPHIC | How Different Generations Consume Media

We all know that the different generations consume media differently, but this new infographic created by MBA Online allows us to see the media habits at a glance.  The data is based on the 2011 report on media consumption by Magid Generational Studies and compiled by Advertising Age. Media consumption is broken down by generation into Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Teen Millennials and the newly named  iGen.

Media Consumption - 2011
Created by: MBA Online

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