Effective SEO Strategies:
The purpose of search engine optimization is pretty straightforward. It is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible. In other words, keep it simple. If your site and your content is confusing to your viewers, then it is also confusing to search engines. Below are the basics which comprise about 80-90% of SEO activities for an individual site.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most high-return activities in the search marketing field. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you. Be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names. Think about your keywords as search terms — how would someone looking for information on this topic search for it?
Content Creation
Content is king. Your content needs to be fresh – and updated regularly. This is crucial for increasing traffic. Your site needs to be useful and well written. The best sites for users, and for search engines, are those that are full of frequently updated, useful information about a given subject.
Site Structure
This is the foundation of all good SEO. The title tag and page header are the two most important spots to put keywords. Even if it is not visible to your viewer ad a site map — a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site — makes it easier for spiders to search your site. Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords. Use Flash, frames and AJAX sparingly and take advantage of image descriptions to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.
Page Optimization
There are two types of page optimization. One is on-page optimization which included the optimization of titles, meta tags, html tags, keywords and synonyms, links and image descriptions. The other is off-page optimization which is includes algorithm-critical elements such as: how many, which sites, the page names and the page ranking of the sites that are linking to you.
Strategies & Tactics
It now involves the entire website experience. Emerging trends include using Social Media to distribute content that is engaging and relevant to the user; community building that engages members for a variety of things like product development, market research, and special product discounts; and integrated campaigns combining social media with local offers involving mobile devices, often referred to as SoLoMo.
Link Building
If content is King, links are Queen. There are many link building strategies and ways to build link. As with all other SEO approaches, you need to be sure your links are appropriate. Link building activities include blogging, leveraging strategic partners, networking, article submissions and inspiring others to share your content. One simple way to increase traffic to individual pages is the integration of internal links to your site.
Both an art and a science
There are different levels of SEO tactics from basic to advanced, but all of them have the same goal in mind – increasing site traffic. No matter if your goal is lead generation, increased sales, improving brand/product awareness or building a community — quality optimization practices are becoming an increasingly critical component of your marketing mix.