This article is meant to be an elementary glimpse into the world of digital marketing; there are many avenues to explore in the realm of marketing on the Internet, but one of the biggies is SEO. Below you will find some of the basic tactics and tricks anyone can do to immediately help with their site's Page Rank (the placement of your site in Google searches). SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of sprinkling specific commonly used words (or “keywords”) into your websites in order to (hopefully) have your page rank higher in Google’s search engine. To find what words you need to use you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Begin by punching in words you think people will use when searching for your company’s trade in Google.Take note of the most commonly used words or phrases, these are your “keywords”.
1) Plug-In Your Keywords!
The trick here is to not use them too much, Google can spot these and will consider your website spam and not post it at all; which is definitely not what you want. Be crafty and use multiple different keywords to plug into your website copy. Think of it as a game of Sudoku, but with words.
2) Write A Blog!
A blog is a great place to show your company culture, its work, and interests. It is also a page on your website that can be updated constantly, which makes it like steroids for SEO. Keep your keywords in mind when writing your articles and do a keyword search for each blog submission.
3) Have Title Tags (H1) Tags!
See how this article is written in numbered/bullet points? Do the same. Google loves numbered/bulleted content with heavy SEO keywords. Not to mention it will help you layout and format your blogs and articles.
4) Share Links!
Network on Facebook and Twitter, share links with your clients and partners. The more sites that link with your page, the higher your website will appear in Google’s listings. Possibly adding a widget to your page to add a Twitter feed to your main page will also generate links and expand your traffic and page rank much in the same way I mentioned having a blog would.
5) The "Secret Image Tag"
Also known as an “alt tag”, this nifty little SEO trick is a quite simple one that will generate links and traffic to your site based on the Google Image Search function. These are the tags that tell what a .gif or .jpg is. By going into your website's code and finding your images (marked with an image description, likely .jpg or .gif), you can add what's called an alt tag to give the image a description. You don't have to do any complex HTML coding. Here is an example of what your ALT tag should look like:<img src="images/services-pic.jpg" alt="XYZ company's website optimization services" width="100" height="78" />It is a good idea to add alt text for every image that a visitor to your site will see. Not only will alt tags increase your image SEO on the image search, but it will also produce some SEO for your overall site; granted you used those keywords we talked about earlier, but once again, don’t overdo it with the keywords. Google will know and flog your site by dropping it into the depths of its page ranks.
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What other tricks or techniques would your small business like to learn about? Marketing? Design? Social Media?
Whatever it is, drop me a line. mattd@mediacontour.com