SEO Tips
After reading about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you're probably ready for some more tips on how to optimize your website.
Go Local
Take every opportunity to push your business in the local area. You may have a hundred competitors worldwide, 50 in your country, 20 in your state or locality and one in your hometown. If you are 100% determined to compete in a global marketplace, you need to pack a global budget, go to an expert level SEO firm, and you shouldn't be reading these tips. Pushing your business as a local resource weeds out competitors like nobody's business.
Up the ante - if your client testimonial is from a business -- add the business name and a link back to their website. This serves to do a little HBO (Human Being Optimization) because the human can check your references are legitimate.
Get Louder
Press releases are the cheapest and probably easiest form of self-promotion. If you really ARE a local company, put out press releases in the local papers for everything you can, and make sure to mention your website address. Local papers usually post their articles on the web nowadays, and thus you get instant website marketing and inbound links to your website. The whole point of website marketing is getting HUMANs to your website. Not search engines. Search engines don't pay well.
Up the ante - send press releases to online syndication services.
Get Personal
Again, this is HBO more than SEO, but content counts in SEO. Take advantage of your About Us page. People who create websites neglect this page, people who visit websites use it to get an idea about the company, the people behind the company, the history of the company, and the personality of the company. If you've neglected branding everywhere else on your website, this is your best chance to redeem yourself. WHO ARE YOU? Your "about us" page can also be the gateway to your company mission, job opportunities, board of director bios.
Up the ante - every About Us page and sub-page should take advantage of mentioning locations in your area. Town, district, city, suburb, county, city. Where did the CEO grow up? Raise your rank in the local search engines.
Stay in Touch
When a business is anonymous they lose kudos for customer service -- have you tried to call Yahoo or eBay? Did you find their phone number? They're big enough to be anonymous but it still loses them kudos. I hate the shopping cart system for buying domain names and hosting services at GoDaddy but I still recommend them to many customers -- not because the price is right, because it would still lose because I don't want to subject my customers to their insane website. I still recommend it because I can tell my clients to just pick up the phone and call them -- their number is on every webpage. GoDaddy wins because of stellar customer service! The web is NOT a vehicle for anonymity -- if you want to make a sale or close a deal give people the option to pick up the phone or write you an email. People want to know where your company is (see also "Get Local") as well as be able to contact a human whenever they get stuck on your website, and that means a PO Box, a phone number. I wouldn't put a fax number or email address personally, those are too prone to abuse, but you should consider those as well depending on the nature of your business.
Up the ante - a webform that emails you is a great way to get customers to contact you quickly and easily. Ask your website designer to create one that hides your email address from spambots.
Seek and ye shall find
If you want to come up in search engines for "rubber bananas" but you never put "rubber bananas" on your website, don't expect to come up in the search engines under "rubber bananas". This is called keywording and it's more complicated than this, but for the two-penny tour if you want to come up under "rubber bananas orange county ny" make sure you have a webpage titled "Rubber Bananas" and the first headline on the page should be "The best Rubber Bananas in Orange County" and the first paragraph should contain relevant information: "If you're interested in bananas made out of rubber, and you talk to anyone in Orange County, they'll tell you they come to Crazy Acres Farms whenever their monkeys want to teethe. Crazy Acres has the best in the industry. We also carry plastic and wood bananas, in case you were wondering. See our online store for all your novelty banana purchases and our clearance section for b-grade and overripe real bananas."
You no longer need to keyword cram, and Google is working on recognizing synonyms. You can naturally optimize pages for 2-3 major keywords each. It's very important to write real articles to help your customers NOT just for the search engines. See these related articles for more details:
Up the ante - add in "metatags" in the HTML that match the keywords you're trying to optimize the page for. There are two metatags that are important for SEO: keywords and description.
Article Updated: June 19, 2013
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