by 
By Lisa Kirschner
Search engine optimization (SEO) should be an integral part of every business owner’s or web manager’s marketing arsenal. You can significantly boost your traffic, conversions and sales by following the right SEO methods and techniques, which I’ve described below.
Commitment to the Process
SEO needs to be consistent and requires a lot of work in your part. Search engine algorithms adjust regularly, so it is important to stay updated with the latest trends and approaches, since some of your methods may no longer work after a few months. You have to be prepared for the long term and view how your business will continue to grow through SEO. Your methods may not seem to be working at first, but you’ll notice results as you continue to enhance the steps and process. Commit to learning everything that you can about SEO, and then put together a plan to make SEO a regular part of your workflow.
The Importance of Content Strategy
One of the most effective methods for optimizing your site is to ensure that it’s easy to navigate and that users can find the high-quality content that they need. You need to give users a reason to come to your site and then come back later–so make sure you provide fresh content (via blog posts, web site promotions, landing pages, new products, events, videos or other engaging content) to your users regularly.
You can also join online forums and discussion boards to talk to your target customers, and be sure that your company has a presence on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Find out which keywords will most likely be used by your target customers and use these wisely throughout your articles and the above-mentioned content. Don’t get overwhelmed by the seemingly large amounts of content needed for all of these channels–it’s easy to hire freelance writers or agencies to help you make relevant and useful articles in a short span of time.
Stay Visible
Include a site map page on your web site and make sure that you utilize modern coding techniques so spiders can see your web site and its content. Spiders cannot index your pages if they cannot be crawled. Make sure you have an easy-to-crawl navigation menu and utilize alt tags for your images. Any good developer or webmaster should be able to help you improve your site’s visibility for search engines.
If you have a big web site, you may need to create multiple site map pages, and make sure that each one has less than 100 links.
Also, keep in mind that your URLs and file names should be search-engine friendly. Avoid using complicated parameters and use hypens–not underscores–in your URLs and filenames. Hyphens are considered a “space,” unlike underscores.
Relevance Matters
Always ensure that you have a relevant title and meta description on each web page. The page title is the most vital factor of on-page SEO. A page is unlikely to rank very high for a primary term without the word being included in the page title and within the page. Rewrite the keyword meta data completely if you find that these are not relevant–but keep in mind that search engine algorithms do not currently give as much weight to keyword meta tags as they previously did. It’s better to ensure that the primary keywords for a page are included in the meta title and within the body content. Always write your content for visitors and tie your page content to accurate keywords that are specific to that page.
These are just a few of the most critical SEO techniques. Contact us to get an SEO analysis of your web site or if you have questions about SEO. We look forward to hearing from you!
Lisa Kirschner
