An effective search engine optimization strategy is vitally important to the long-term success of your business. Without one, you may occasionally get lucky and rank well enough in the major search engines for potential customers to find your web site. However, you will probably still need to rely heavily on paid forms of advertising to bring in enough visitors to grow and maintain your business. Even if you plan to run a sustained PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaign, you will still want to take advantage of all the free web traffic you can get.
Here’s How to Obtain Better Search Engine Optimization Results in 3 Easy Steps
1. Do Your Research. Keyword research is the cornerstone of any search engine optimization campaign. Keywords are the terms or phrases that Internet users type into the search engines when looking for something online. For example, phrases such as “dog boarding” or “dry cleaners in Cleveland” may be used by individuals needing those services. When looking for keywords for your search engine optimization efforts, you will want to consider several variables, including your target market, your key products or services, your geographic location and most importantly, your customers’ main challenges or concerns. Once you develop this list, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool to determine how many searches are performed each month for that term and how strong the competition is for it.
2. Create Great Content. Once you find a list of keywords or phrases with the right blend of high demand and low-to-moderate competition, the next step is to develop strong content around those terms. This content should provide real value to your audience by addressing their problems or concerns. Don’t go overboard when adding keywords to your content, however. Although there are no hard and fast rules on this topic, a good rule of thumb is to include your targeted keywords in the title and first sentence of your article or blog post, then once for every 100 words. This will give you a keyword saturation of approximately 1%, which will give the search engines a good idea what your content is about without alienating your human visitors.
3. Promote Your Content. Once you’ve added keyword-optimized content to your web site, the next step is to help it find an audience. The best way to do this is to develop quality backlinks pointing into your site. (Backlinks are simply links to your site from other web sites). The major search engines read each backlink to your site as a vote of confidence for it. Therefore, the more quality backlinks your site has, the more of an ‘authority site’ the search engines will perceive it to be – and the more likely they will be to ‘recommend’ it (via higher search rankings) to their customers. Submitting content to article directories, writing guest blog posts for respected sites in your industry, and commenting on relevant blogs and forums are all great ways to accomplish this.
Although it takes time and effort to develop and execute a successful search engine optimization strategy, the long-term results are definitely worth it. Once you have a substantial body of well-optimized content ranking well in the search engines, your web site will receive a steady supply of free traffic for years to come.
The winning students were excited and overwhelmed with the prospect of their new business venture and will be coached by the EEC's representatives on their college campus. 