How to Create an SEO Strategy
If your web site was a lonely hearts listing, what would it say about your business? Would it mention your great sense of humor, your snappy dress sense, and caring nature? Or would it describe you as someone who plays it safe, is a leader, not a follower, and blends with the crowd at all costs? As in dating, first impressions count when it comes to your web presence.
Make sure your web site is optimized for the web with the following handy hints…
Step 1: Do Your Research
To successfully target clients and get them clicking on to your web site, you first have to put yourself in their shoes. Decide on the five most relevant keywords and phrases that best describe your business, products, and services. Speak to your existing clients and ask them how they would describe what you do. What would they type into a search engine to find your company? This is very important as it provides a tried and tested clutch of phrases that you should be optimizing your site for. After all, you don’t want to be number one in the natural listings for the trade titles of your top sellers if your customers know it by another name entirely.
Step 2: Know Your Position
Now you have a checklist of phrases, find out where your website is currently positioned for these keywords. You can do this manually by visiting each search engine in turn and or you can use software that researches you. Try the free trial of Advanced Web Ranking. You can also use this resource to check out your competitors’ positions, giving you a good idea of exactly how much work you have to do.
Step 3: Measure Your Popularity
Knowing which phrases you need to optimize and how far behind the game you are is a great starting point but won’t win you the girl. Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to measure your popularity online than it is in the real world.
Download the Google webmaster suite to monitor your progress. This includes the Google Page Rank tool, showing you how the search engine rates the importance of your page. The page rank tool will show you how good a job you are doing, the better the page rank, the better your optimization, and the higher your organic search position.
Step 4: Get Writing
Now you’ve done your homework, the work begins. The quickest and most effective way to raise your online brand profile is to write a press release about your company. Be sure to include all of the keywords identified in step one. The most effective PR items use these words as soon as possible in the copy – so try to work them into the title, the first line, and the first paragraph and then use synonyms throughout. Your press release should be informative and interesting. Do you have a special offer you could include? Have you just signed a big new client? Launched a new product? Are you approaching a company anniversary?
Whatever you end up writing about, include a small ‘about us’ section at the end, giving a short overview of the company, and always, always include your web site address and contact information.
Step 5: Distribution
To get your press release visible online and to get websites queuing up to give those all-important backlinks (links back to your website) you need to get busy and start distributing your PR. Open accounts with free online press distribution channels such as Clickpress and The Open Press to get your PR syndicated to lots of RSS feeds and web sites. This will help increase the number of potential linkbacks. If you haven’t yet opened a blog, now is the time to do so. Create your free account at Blogger and get posting. Finally, get the email addresses of local journalists, newspapers, magazines, and web sites and add them to your distribution list. News web sites often have a good Google page rank and are indexed regularly by the search engine web bots, making them a great source of quality linkbacks.
Remember, as new opportunities present themselves, new press items should be written and distributed. Keep updating the PR channels and web sites you would like to link to you. You could also consider creating your virtual press-room and posting the press releases on your website.