SEO: Making it Work for Your Business

SEOWhat business owner doesn’t want to grow, improve and prosper? And navigating through, and making use of, all the tools and assets in the expanding digital world of rankings and search engines is crucial in getting your name our there. Exposure and awareness leads to more business.

One important variable and tool stands out among the vast number of options for lead generation and ways to increase visibility, and particularly through leading search engine Google, and others like Bing and Yahoo; it’s SEO – Search Engine Optimization.

What is an SEO? Essentially, SEO is described as the process of improving the visibility and promotion of a website (or web page) by increasing the number of visitors the site receives through optimizing their search engine rank.

So just how do you utilize SEO to improve your web profile? We asked the folks at Ciplex, a digital lead generation consulting firm, who specialize in upping SEO ante for businesses for some surefire tips to achieving solid SEO results. Great SEO results mean a boost on search sites. Here are some general guidelines from Ari Roth, Ciplex SEO Account Manager:

1) Since the fundamental component of SEO is linking keywords back to your business, finding out which keywords potential customers would ideally search to find you is essential (i.e. what is your business: Asian-fusion restaurant, organic coffee house, eatery within a hotel, etc?). Run through the recently updated Google’s Keyword Planner to retrieve keyword data, to see which words drive the most search traffic, average monthlysearch numbers, and competitive scores. Ultimately, you want to use keywords with the highest visit and traffic volume naturally within your content/title tag on the most relevant page on your site.

2) Acquiring links (think cross-promotion) from like-minded, relevant, and high quality sites is another great way to up your SEO ante. Partner with loyal customers, vendors, bloggers/social media influencers and industry news sites – and let your work and the affirmation provided by others speak for itself. Positioning your site as an industry leader by producing topnotch, original, fresh, and informative content (complete with graphics, videos and photography, all of which are also loved by the Google search engines!) will make others take notice and want to link to your site.

3) One of the biggest search signals Google utilizes is anchor text (i.e. linked/hyperlinked text). So when building new links, Ari also recommends most links to be “branded” rather than only using keywords as links. For example, when referencing our own brand, we’ll most often link to VSAG.com, as apposed to keywords because if too many references use keyword-rich links, the link/brand/company profile as a whole looks unnatural – and Google’s crawlers and readers are on the lookout for any abuses or shady activity, and might penalize your site.

4) Keep on top of industry changes (such as Google’s new version of Keyword Planner, and Bing’s methods of multi-media searches) by reviewing relevant SEO blogs and news sites regularly. Staying current will allow you to adjust content and address issues as needed to reap the most benefit from your efforts.

Some SEO sites Roth recommends bookmarking for regular reference are: Moz.com: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Moz.com: SEO blog, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable. See also Google’s Business Solutions site for more SEO related ideas for growing your business on the web.

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SEO photo courtesy of: youngblah.com