If you’re in business for yourself, I want you to stop everything you’re currently doing and follow these simple instructions.
1. Enter www.google.com (or try Bing, Yahoo, Ask…) in your address bar. Click Go.
2. In the search bar, type in some key words in your industry. How would people find you?
3. Where do you rank?
If you’re not on the first page of results, it’s time to re-evaluate your web content for keywords, metatags and possibly invest in a serious SEO program. I don’t want to get in to anything too technical for the purpose of this blog – but I did want to cover some of the basics and why these things are critical to the success of your company.
First of all, search engine statistics are staggering. I don’t go a single day without searching google three or four times. Usually, the first page of results gets the majority of my attention – because what’s the internet if not efficient? I won’t spend the extra few minutes to tab over to the third page (ok, maybe it’s a laziness, but why bother when I can find my result on page 1?).
Let’s say I’m looking for a local Real Estate Agent in Orlando Florida. What would I type in? New Home Orlando, Realtor Orlando, maybe Resale Home Orlando? I’m going to want the first result that the description is closest to what I’m looking for. So I’ll weed out a couple that aren’t relevant, and narrow down to the relevant results.
This is where a strong SEO program would come in. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to your website through search engines via natural (organic) searches. SEO considers keywords and phrases that people would generally search for, and edits the HTML (behind the scenes language of your website) to use those keywords.
The basic way to get your SEO stronger, is to look at the content of your website. First, make sure the majority of your website is using html coding. If your website is entirely flash-based, having an SEO management company will be crucial to making your site optimized. For html sites, it’s great to have some flash content to add visual interest, but when the search engine goes to “crawl” your website, it’s looking for readable content that it can pick words from. All of the words on your website will help your placement in an organic search.
Blogs are an excellent source of organic SEO. Everything you write ends up being crawled and keyworded… not to mention your ability to tag and categorize all of your entries. These are easy to add keywords that will help your positioning in search engine results… so don’t skimp! You also don’t want to go overboard and add irrelevant tags. So keep it as robust as you can, while staying on track.
To track and analyze your SEO, you’ll want to utilize an awesome analytics program, like Google Analytics… but more on that next time!
Tags: blogging, creating wow, creatingwow, homebuilder marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing expert, internet marketing help, internet marketing hotline, internet marketing support, meredith communications, meredith oliver, optimization, organic search, professional speaker, real estate marketing, sea, search engine, sem, seo, Social Media, social media marketing, social networking, web marketing help, web marketing strategy, Website Analytics
