How To Create A Stronger SEO

Most marketers know the true value of a good SEO campaign, and many have have incorporated a few search engine optimization tactics into their marketing efforts. But do you really have a clear and coherent strategy for optimizing your site?  Developing a strong SEO campaign requires having a plan for each step of the process. The steps involved include determining and incorporating keywords, creating content and links and continuously improving based on results or changes in the industry.

First things first: Do you know what SERPs are? Do you understand the difference between back links and outbound links? If someone asks you about your anchor text, will you be able to give them statistics on its efficacy? Do some research before you dive into the world of SEO. The more you understand upfront, the less scrambling you’ll do as you actually build your website.

Make sure you’re getting all the traffic from local customers seeking your products or services. For example, if you’re running a business out of Las Vegas, you don’t want your keywords to be simply “house cleaning.” They should be things like “house cleaning in Vegas” or “Las Vegas maid service.”

Simply put, your page URLs should reflect the page title. All those URLs you see with an endless amount of numbers and symbols? Horrible for SEO. Search engines like Google actually use URLs to understand the content for your pages. So choose a URL that’s simple, yet reflects the content for that specific web page.

Naturally, you want your company’s website to start showing up in Google, but do you know what keywords you are trying to rank for? Carrying out keyword research using Google AdWords Keyword Planner you are able to find out the important terms you should be focusing on, how often they are being used and even the amount of competition surrounding them. This will let you know how to focus your content in order to get the most out of your website and allows you to conduct competitor analysis keyword research too.

It’s the first thing search engines read when scanning your website. Page titles are critical because they’re basically telling the search engines what you’re trying to get found for.

Here is where many companies drop the ball with their SEO strategy. It’s important to optimize your page titles with the appropriate keyword you’re trying to rank for. Simply titling your page, “Home”, or “Services” is going to severely impact the success of your campaign.

Change is inevitable, and the SEO world is a particularly fast-moving target. Search engines regularly update their ranking software, and what works today may not work as well tomorrow (or, in some cases, may actually hurt your ranking.) This means that it is essential to stay on top of the latest updates and trends and be willing to change your strategy when needed.

How can you tell if your SEO strategy is producing results? You don't have to guess. There are multiple tools and services that allow you to track your progress and measure your return on investment. That means you can test different strategies to see what works and what doesn't. You can then focus on the efforts that provide the best ROI and duplicate individual successes throughout your site.

Here at IMPACT, we’re big on creating content that’s very “readable,” meaning, we’d like our visitors to enjoy scanning through our website content. This means including images, bullet points, headers, and anything else necessary to make our web pages visually appealing. Obviously images go a long way here, as they’re an excellent way of making your content more appealing. However, if you use them correctly, they can also be more appealing to the search engines.

There are two ways of doing this; one is to give the image a relevant file name, preferable containing the keywords you’re trying to get the page to rank for. For instance, any image contained in this Ebook should contain the file name, “how-an-inbound-marketing-agency-does-SEO.jpg.” The second way to optimize your images is to include alt tags, allowing you to include keywords using a small piece of text to be included in the code of the image.

This is especially true for blog articles, but should also be applied to your other web pages as well.When your creating content for your blog article or web page, link to some of the other blogs or pages on your website. This leads your visitors to even more content on your website, while also providing yet another SEO opportunity by including keywords in the anchor text of the link.

These are just ways to take advantage of the online market through clever, purposeful SEO. If you’re serious about succeeding as a business in the 21st century, you’ll need your webpage to be optimized for success. Good luck!