SEO Techniques for Higher Visibility LeadFormix Best Practices

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2 Introduction How do people find you on the Internet? How will business prospects know where to find your product? Can people across geographies find your product or service if you only advertise locally? The best and most innovative solution to reach the right prospects for your product or service is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As Gartner analyst Ed Thompson said, There is no one quick fix that will drive great customer experience a great experience is built from thousands of small improvements over time. Similarly, search engine optimization is not a one-time quick fix solution. It takes continuous effort and time to achieve visible results. What is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Optimization is a powerful web marketing technique that helps search engines find and rank your website higher than thousands of other websites in response to a keyword search. It helps improve the visibility of a website or specific page in search engines through natural or organic search. As opposed to outbound marketing (another term for traditional marketing) where the marketing reach is from the company to the customer, SEO is an inbound marketing technique that aids marketers to be found by prospects

3 Search Results from Competitive Search Engines

4 Why is SEO Important? SEO is important because it addresses key areas that marketers need to focus while selling or advertising their product/service, online. SEO creates awareness, helps acquire new customers, converts visitors to customers and optimizes the marketing efforts towards targeted buyers. Finally, it increases traffic to website and guarantees increased sales. There are trillions of websites and the Internet is still growing. To come up in search engine result, optimizing your page or SEO is essential.

5 Here are some powerful revealing stats on SEO. 59% of Internet users search the web every day. 78% of users conduct searches for info on products or services 57% of businesses have acquired customers through their company blog. 50% of consumers start purchase with online research 63% of B2B buyers start with online research 85% of B2B buyers do online research during purchase cycle. Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional marketing 75% don t look beyond the first page of results 70% of links clicked are organic links Rankings 1-5 in search engines are 10 times more likely to be clicked on than rankings 6 and7

6 Best Practices for SEO Success 1. Target the right Keywords Choosing the right keywords, including long tail keywords, can make or break your SEO campaign. Keywords are used to search for information on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN etc. Targeting a single keyword for SEO will not be fruitful; hence we must target group of keywords. Be sure that you have the right keyword density for your page. The rule of thumb is to achieve a keyword density of 5% of total copy per page, more than that, it starts looking a little spammy. Make sure that the copy is of good quality.

7 2. Assign Proper Meta Tags (URL, Title, Description, Keyword) Title - As <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title, it is the most important place to have your keyword. The title tag plays an important role in indexing your website. Search engine will look at the title tag to determine what the page is all about. URL - Having your key word in the URL will help increase your site s search engine visibility. If you are using keywords in the URL, they should be separated by hyphen e.g. Keeping URLs as short as possible can be advantageous. This makes your brand stand out for long tail search terms and helps search engines understand what content is located at this path and how important it is. Description - It is what your visitor sees when your link comes up in search. Description helps them decide whether or not to click on your link. Include primary and secondary keyword in the description tag. It should not be stuffed with keywords, or else search engine will completely ignore it. Keyword list - It is best to have not more than five keywords for any page. Think of specific terms people will search for your page.

8 3. Develop Content People read around 25% or less on the Web. They look at headings and subheadings first and then they scan for hyperlinks, numerals, and keywords. There might be multiple goals for a site. How you address them is up to you, but you should understand what your customers are most likely to be looking for. Some typical goals are: How do I get to? How much does cost? What are the features of? Why should I buy instead of? How can I learn how to? The most important aspect of SEO is having content relevant to the page or site topic. If the content in the page is not relevant to the target keywords, it will be ineffective. So, be descriptive. Include the key elements of the thought in your headline (your <H1>, <H2> tags). This gives the reader a good idea of what they ll get if they read further, and also you ll have a visual break in the text. The initial paragraph on each page must always contain what will be at the conclusion of that page. This enables the website users to immediately understand what the page is about and decide whether they want to continue with the page or not. Focus on the product s unique selling proposition(usp). It can be about the product, its features or benefits. The key is to make it relevant and to have it make sense to the reader. As far as search engines are concerned, based on h1 and h2 tag, it will automatically know what is there in the text. These heading tags help index your site properly. Once the content is created, make sure the keywords are where they should be. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them. Domain wide keyword usage matters.

9 4. Build Links Link building is an integral part of any effective SEO strategy. It helps to get quality traffic from relevant sites. The more targeted backlinks you build for your site, the more likely you will get the right visitor to convert into a customer. Targeted link building is great for driving fast and long term traffic to your site. Some ways of link building include: 1. Directory submissions 2. Blog and forum postings 3. Social bookmarking 4. Classified ads 5. Article marketing 6. Link exchange (with relevant sites) 7. Link baits However, the common metrics applicable for any social network would be based on connections gained, interactions made, referrals acquired and profiles of group members/connections. Another important metric to monitor is how active and passionate your social community is to spread your word further. Some Don ts for SEO Flash without HTML Web crawlers do not see Flash movies. They might be attractive but not to search engines. If your site must be Flash-based and you want search engines to find it, be sure to provide an html version. Java Script Menu Using JavaScript for navigation looks good, but you need to understand that search engines do not read JavaScript. So if you want JavaScript menus on your website, you should consider building a sitemap, so that all your links will be crawled.

10 Conclusion Each search engine has its own way of indexing a website. For example, for Yahoo! and Bing, onpage keyword factors are of primary importance, while Google places great emphasis on links. For Google, the older the website, better the ranking, while Yahoo has no such preferences towards sites and domains. Thus it might take you longer to achieve higher site ranking in Google than Yahoo. Summing it up, to achieve top search results, focus on developing targeted content, follow SEO guidelines and grow. Find out more about LeadFormix Search Engine Optimization offerings Unsure about how much work your site needs? Want to know more about search engine optimization for your website? Send us an ! We re here to help you! Share this ebook