Ride the SEO Wave

By Jennifer E. Dunphy

Most business will fall into one of three categories with their SEO strategy: swimming, treading water or drowning! For the latter two, there is hope. But time is of the essence.

SEO is not a marketing avenue where you want to be a fast follower. SEO is one giant puzzle, consisting of dozens of pieces. No one piece alone is enough to achieve or maintain first-page ranking. But if you follow certain steps, you’ll be well on your way to swimming to the top with the big fish.

Step 1: If your website is difficult to navigate or has an outdated appearance, you are going to have a difficult time getting online traffic. Make it easy for people to do business with you online and the search engines will reward your site for creating a favorable visitor experience. Insuring all of the onsite optimization is present will also make it easier for the search engines to index your website and serve it up in the search results.

Step 2: Define your target audience and craft your strategy to create an engaging experience for them. Search engines strive to deliver quality data to searchers. If your website successfully does this, you will reap the rewards with higher rankings. Research how your prospective clients search online and what you need to focus on to ensure they will find you and not the competition. Use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool.

Step 3: You can make or break an SEO strategy in the very beginning with your keyword targeting. Select the keywords that drive not only traffic, but targeted conversions. Let’s face it, millions of monthly visitors to your site is great, but worthless if none of them are resulting in new business. SEO is granular: many factors play into when each keyword will rank in search results. More competitive, broader scope keywords will likely take longer to rank. You will want to insure you have a variety of different levels of keywords in your strategy, as they will all rank in their own time – some sooner than others.

Step 4: To maximize your website’s online exposure you need to create content, both onsite and offsite, that includes the keywords you are optimizing for. Make sure the posts are rich with information and offer value to visitors. SEO content comes in many forms: your website, blogs, social media sites, wikis, online directories, online videos, images, press releases and articles. One of the easiest ways to get started is with a company blog. Then you can devise a social media strategy. As search marketing becomes more personalized, the importance of integrating social media content into your SEO efforts becomes increasingly important. With over 800 million active users, Facebook is an ideal network for you to start your social efforts.

Step 5: Link building is evergreen and never ending. Think of each inbound link (links which direct to your site) as a vote of confidence. The more inbound links, the better. However, the quality and relevancy of these links is as important as the quantity. Linking with low quality or spammy sites can actually hurt your website rankings. Furthermore, the anchor text linking to your site should consist of keywords that are relevant to your site rather than your business name. A great way to start the link building process is by utilizing social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Write a captivating blog post and share it on the social networks to facilitate the linking process. Guest blogging on authority industry sites is another great strategy to generate quality inbound links. Establish yourself as an industry expert and the links will follow.

Step 6: Last but not least, measure the results. This helps ensure that you’re utilizing the analytic tools available to you, like Google Analytics. This will allow you to dissect and disseminate the valuable data that can help you make important decisions regarding the direction of your online marketing efforts.

With more than 2 billion people online, there is an immense opportunity to tap into. It’s primetime for you to dive in and ride the SEO wave.

Jennifer E. Dunphy is the founder and marketing executive of the Internet Marketing Firm Vayu Media. Under Jennifer’s leadership the firm has become the leading SEO firm in Atlanta and is regarded as one of the most reputable search firms in the Southeastern U.S.