Musings of the Creative Noggins

With Internet Marketing getting everyone buzzing these days, a term that gets thrown around quite a bit is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  You’ll see it in business articles, in blogs, hear about it in coffee shops and from your marketing partners. 

I’ve spent the last year really delving deep into the world of SEO.  Learning what works.  What is hype.  And one of the most scary things that I have learned is that there are so many people professing to be able to SEO your website out there who really don’t know much more about it than you do. Everyone who can basically log-on to Google and create an AdWords campaign thinks they can do SEO for businesses.  Be wary of these people!

If you are really wanting to do good SEO, pay-per-click marketing may be a part of your temporary strategy while you get your website up to speed to capture good organic traffic.  But if you do it right, you shouldn’t have to pay for clicks over the long run.

You’re goal should be to come up on the first page of Google results without paying for it.  That’s what people in the
SEO world refer to as “coming up in the organic results.”  This is the golden zone since most people look to these results before they look to the ads.  Plus, if you do it right, it won’t cost you anything!

If you want good, organic SEO, here are the core elements you must have as part of your overall strategy:

1.  A killer keyword strategy.  The first thing you need to do is to figure out what keywords your market is searching to find information pertinent to your industry and/or product.  There are a bunch of different keyword tools out there, including a free one from Google that works fairly well. 

The only thing I will caution you in not to get too excited when you see the number of searches that Google gives per keyword using their tool.  Remember that this tool is built for people who are putting together pay-per-click campaigns so it estimates the number of impressions not just based upon Google searches, but also paid content ads that are placed within the Google search network.  In other words, if your search term is “SEO” and I had Google AdWords on my blog, then your ad might be placed on this very page, because it is deemed relevant search content by Google.  But of course, these aren’t searches that you’ll be able to capitalize upon unless you’re paying Google for pay-per-click ads, so they don’t truly represent organic search.

That said, though, the tool can still give you a good idea of what phrases are getting play in search, which have high search volume and which do not.

My advice is to play in the mid range.  Long term you can put together a strategy to capture traffic from very high volume words on your site.  But in the meantime, these words/phrases are difficult to rank for and will take some time to capture traffic.  So, in order to pickup traffic fast, be sure to utilize phrases with mid-range traffic and you should have a better chance of getting picked up by the search engines more quickly.

Be sure and put your customer’s websites through the keyword tool so you can see what phrases their website is picking up!

2.  Use your page titles and meta data to pickup organic traffic!  The searchbots for Google and the other key search engines are looking at certain places on your website when they scan your site to see what you are about.  It’s important to update this info on every page of your site and utilize keywords on each page consistently so that Google knows to pickup that page for the search term/phrase that you’re targeting.  Be sure to utilize the following to increase each page’s SEO:

• Page title
• Page description
• URL
• Headlines
• Photo names
• Photo descriptions

Of course, be sure not to SEO a page for a certain term unless the content on that page is actually relevant.  You don’t want to consistently use the term “contemporary chairs” on a page and pickup traffic only to have viewers land on that page and find irrelevant content. 

Then, use the content to capture the traffic once they’re there!  There’s nothing worse than getting people to your site, only to lose them!

3.  Good organic content.  In the olden days (I guess in Internet Marketing, that’s pre-2008!), businesses would use their website as basically an online brochure.  With all of the content that THEY wanted you to know about them.

Things have changed.  Companies are realizing that in order to develop a relationship with their market they need to provide them with the information that they are looking for in relation to their product or industry.  As individuals, we have a certain trust factor that we develop with those who provide us the content that we are most interested in and are more likely to do business with those companies.

Voila!  Enter the Internet.  Clearing house of pretty much any and all information that people are looking for on a daily basis.  Thus, presenting a phenomenal opportunity to businesses to be the key provider of said content!

Don’t just rely on the keyword tools available to you to find out what your market is searching for on the Internet.  Do some digging.  Read blogs.  Go on Twitter.  Talk with your customers.  Find out what is on their minds and making them tick and then put together a website that is unique from your competition and provides them with great information on that topic. 

Make it deep.  Make it relevant.  Make it unique.

4.  More is actually better in SEO.  Okay, in the olden days this would make me cringe.  The design savvy critic in me hated websites that were laden with content, where you had to scroll for miles on page after page in order to find anything. 

Do realize, though, that you can still have a site that is heavy on content–good content–and still not have a copy heavy site.  The balance of good design and copy that is well written for the web will give your readers a nice framework for learning and reading without getting bogged down in tons of heavy text.

The fact is that people do not like reading heavy copy on screen.  We read 30% slower on a monitor than we do the printed word and we also prefer to read at a lower education level just because it makes content on screen easier to scan. 

You don’t have to “dumb it down” and sound uneducated.  You just need to speak in simple and conversational terms, use scanable text, such as bullets, and put the most pertinent info first so people can find it without digging. 

My rule for writing for the web.  Write as if you were speaking directly to your audience.  Don’t use corporate jargon, tone down the marketing-speak and don’t write like you’d write a brochure.  And make sure you’re using your keywords so that Google recognizes you! 

And keep in mind that the fact is, a 100 page site about widgets had much better odds of picking up traffic than a 10 page site.  Especially if they’re writing strategically and utilizing the key SEO elements.

5.  Keep it fresh!  This is where having a blog is so helpful.  The search robots will usually scan a site 1-2x a week for new content.   But if you have a blog, with constantly changing content, you can train the search robots to search your site more frequently.

That’s why it’s also important to host your blog on a subdomain of your site.  That way the traffic that you’re getting to your blog will boost the ranking of your website, and vice versa.  Your blog doesn’t have to “look” like your site.  It can be a unique spinoff.  But it’s still a good idea to have your blog tied in to your domain so that you’ll get credit from Google where credit is due. 

Plus, having a blog will keep the content fresh, allow you to hit upon more key phrases and give your readership more reasons to check back in to your website/blog for more information.  The more they visit, the deeper the relationship.

Okay, this wraps up the five core elements to good SEO.  Hope that they help you in your website endeavors.  There’s still so much more to know, but this should definitely get your started!  I’d love to hear any success stories out there.  Let me know your thoughts on SEO.

by Tracy Marlowe