5 Basic Steps to Organic SEO

 

Organic SEO

SEO is an ever-changing landscape and experts in this space get smarter and smarter every day. With web tools and digital marketing becoming more of a mainstream skill, the common marketer is now able to manage site optimization and other SEO tactics fairly easily. However, the spiders are now tracking places where people congregate and are starting crawl social communities such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Those skilled SEO specialists are now working these channels to increase search engine rankings.

The field of play continues to widen and there are still large numbers of web sites that are way behind in building authority around keywords and topics. With competition growing in nearly every space, SEO is becoming a vital aspect in market positioning and getting found by your prospects.

Since we’ve been watching search engine optimization, we’ve found that the basic foundation around organic SEO is being ignored by many companies. If you aren’t familiar, organic SEO includes those items that aren’t paid for. For instance, pay per click or adwords are not organic because they are paid for. Organic is everything else that can be done to increase your search rankings.

So, here are 5 basic steps to SEO if you haven’t done these already. These 5 steps are the minor building blocks required in order to start being found by your prospects and new customers.

  1. Embed keywords on EVERY page, not just your home page. In addition to adding the keywords, make sure that they aren’t the same across all pages. Strategies around the long tail will be saved for another article. Don’t know the keywords on your site? Just right click on the page, view source and CNTL+F “keyword” to see what’s there.
  2. Make sure that your meta description for each page is keyword rich and fits into 160 characters. The meta description is the blurb that people find in search engine results describing what is on each page. Most people ignore this one. Search on your site and see what comes up.
  3. Make sure each page title (the browser tab at the top of this page) is keyword rich and relevant to the page. Something like ABC Company Services is not the best option.
  4. Use keywords in your page headers. Your page headers are typically the descriptions of your main copy. If you are in the plumbing business, you are better off having a header like “Plumbing Services” in your services page, versus something like “Our Services”.
  5. Make your copy in the website relevant and keyword rich. Adding a few keyword rich links back to other pages across your site also helps.

There are companies that have departments completely focused on SEO. Getting found by search engines for some industries is a make or break business strategy. Even if your company doesn’t see value in search engine optimization, keep in mind that there is a direct correlation between site traffic and new revenue. Think about the top 1000 web sites and the revenue/valuation of the companies operating those sites. Even if your site will never reach the top 1000, there is a greater chance of getting found by your prospects if your site is responding well to search crawlers.

Use these 5 basic steps to get started on SEO, or contact us to start an Inbound Marketing program which includes SEO. It’s a quick and easy exercise!