Four ways to improve SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might just be the most important marketing tool in the arsenal right now. It’s certainly not the only one, but there won’t be many firms that can get by over the next few years without doing SEO.

With that kind of demand comes an increase in supply. There is an exploding number of SEO firms right now, and they all want your business. I’m sure you’ve received an email from at least one of them in the last week. (If not, you have a much better spam filter than I do.) Actually, a good SEO firm can be tremendously beneficial – the problem is that many of them don’t have a solid understanding of their clients and clients’ target markets. I fully endorse using a good SEO firm. But if you are the DIY type, here are a few easy ways to make sure that your website is serving your business well:

Index your site on Google
Sounds simple but it’s smart to double check that your web vendor has indexed your site on Google. Also make sure your site is using Google Analytics, which requires a line of code to be added to each page of your website. Google Analytics is a powerful web statistics tool for not only tracking website visitors but also keywords that are driving traffic to your site.

Page titles
Every page on a website should have as unique a page title as possible. This is the key driver for searches on a specific product or service – Google will send them to these individual pages, not just to your homepage. Page titles should include the most important keyword phrase(s) used on the page and be no longer than 70 characters.

Meta descriptions
Include a short description of each page – this is embedded into the code by your web vendor or through a website Content Management System (CMS). The description should reflect content that can be found on that page as it is indexed by all search engines and is displayed in the search results.

Keyword-rich content
Every web page should consist of keyword-rich content that is strategic and appropriate. You don’t want to infuse a page with lots of keywords for the sake of it – keep it relevant and up-to-date. If terminology changes in your industry or new trends emerge, edit your content to reflect these changes.

We applied these simple fixes to two of our clients’ websites and have seen incredible results – their organic search traffic has tripled in only one month.