Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don’t have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they’d like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I’ve attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.

Promote Your Site Everywhere
Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you’re simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don’t want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.

Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry
Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone’s face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn’t as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?

Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building “natural” links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.

Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere
Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others’ blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.

Submit Your Site to Directories
Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won’t go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of “weight” with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!

There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for “directory submission service”). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it’s very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don’t get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get “credit” for being listed in a lot of the online directories.

Engage in a Free PR Campaign
While print media isn’t as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don’t go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you’re truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.

Basic SEO isn’t that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you’d promote your business offline—it’s all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.

Link building is one of the primary tenets of effective search engine optimization. To that end, here are 30 link building tips you can utilize to pole vault your site to the top of the charts.

1. Generate quality content that is worthy of linking to
2. Create a video
3. Write articles to share on your site
4. Send link requests to webmasters of related sites 3. Submit articles to online e-zines and industry trade journals
5. Start a blog
6. Submit your site to free web directories including DMOZ
7. Maintain links to all of your domains (provided you own more than one and they are legitimate)
8. Have a blogroll (links to related other sites from your blog)
9. Comment on blogs related to your site and topic
10. Use trackbacks on blogs
11. Link only to related sites that rank fairly well
12. Join link exchange sites such as LinkMetro or GotLinks (do your homework with these types of sites; some links may be of poor quality)
13. Create a podcast (interview someone, be interviewed, share quality information)
14. Create RSS feeds for your sites
15. Host a teleseminar or webinar that requires registration
16. Create a top 10 list (people love lists!)
17. Host a free helpful tool on your site
18. Purchase a link on a high ranking site
19. Use a pay-per-post site
20. Add industry related news to your site
21. Report on an event that isn’t getting a lot of coverage
22. Survey your clients to generate a unique free report based on the survey results
23. Generate and submit press releases
24. Join and contribute to social community sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc.
25. Contribute to industry forums and message board discussions; use signature to link back to your site(s)
26. Ask or answer a question to members of Yahoo Answers
27. Join and utilize social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.ici.ous, StumbleUpon, etc.; use signature to link back to your site(s)
28. Add your site to local government sites
29. Add your site for inclusion in local search results
30. Have a contest with a valuable prize given to the winner (people love prizes!)

Next time you’re looking for a little inspiration on a link building campaign, review the tips above to try something you may have not tried before and monitor its progress. Link building doesn’t have to be hard, but it should definitely be included in your search optimization campaign.

ThomasNet and Google state that “83% of today’s buyers use search engines for sourcing new products and services.”  With nearly 8 billion searches performed each month (Source: Nielsen/NetRatings), search engine optimization can be an extremely powerful marketing tool to leverage in generating highly targeted and qualified leads for your business through your website. 

 9 of every 10 search users click on a result within the first three pages of search results (Source: iProspect, “Search Engine User Behavior Study,” April 2006). Placing a billboard in the desert doesn’t make much sense, but having a website that isn’t consistently visible in the upper rankings of search engine results pages doesn’t do a whole lot of good either.  In order to achieve success, here are five strategic areas to consider to better your odds of reaching your online marketing objectives. 

Focus on Business Goals

What is your business looking to achieve over the next year to three years, and how could internet marketing contribute to reaching those objectives?  The reason to ask this question is a lot of businesses dive into SEO with a goal of ranking well for a certain keyword or phrase without considering the impact on their organization.  Assuming you are successful with your SEO campaign, how is your business going to handle a large influx of potential leads?  What happens if people begin to order products and services online at a much higher clip?  Are your employees prepared for this, and are your technical resources capable of handling loads of traffic? 

SEO is a Marketing Ploy

There are businesses out there that will scrap their existing marketing campaigns in favor of marketing exclusively online.  While SEO can provide a solid ROI, it’s not a magic bullet.  It’s merely another marketing ploy that can provide qualified leads—don’t lose sight of that as your business sets out to attract more of its desired target audience.  If anything, look at what works well today and continue with those efforts while implementing SEO instead of something ineffective.   

Generate Quality Content

One of the tenets of organic search engine optimization is content generation.  You want to produce quality that will separate your from your competitors and help your audience learn more about your industry.  If you produce enough quality information that helps your audience, you’ll be looked upon as the go-to resource or authority. 

Test Everything

When implementing a marketing campaign of any sort, testing variables should be incorporated throughout so that the campaign can be measured.  Ranking better in a search engine result page isn’t an effective measurement by itself.  It’s nice to rank well, but how many more eyeballs dos that ranking generate for your website, and what are those extra eyeballs doing once they visit your site?  Are they doing what you want them to, or are they following a pattern that suggests change?  If you don’t test and measure, you won’t have any way to answer the key visitor behavioral questions to propel your business forward. 

Strong Call to Action

At the beginning of any marketing campaign, there should be some set of actions you want your desired target audience to do once they interact with your organization.  Make those actions crystal clear.  Getting a flood of visitors to discover your site is interesting to a small degree, but what good does it do you if they don’t do anything once they visit?  Having a strong call to action that you test and monitor will increase your ROI over the long haul. 

 

While search engine optimization can be very cost effective and produce a nice marketing ROI if handled properly, it requires a strong strategic understanding of the underlying business and the potential prospects visiting your website.  Following the tips outlined above can help guide you to the promised land with your online marketing efforts.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is a highly involved, somewhat lengthy, process designed to elevate an internet website’s major search engine ranking and/or positioning. The major search engines (Google, Microsoft Network (MSN), and Yahoo) make up greater than 70% of search traffic on the internet. This is a common way for people to find others, information, companies, potential business partners, etc. by entering a “keyword” or search term. Typically, the searcher will seek information on their keyword or search term and click on the top results. Thus the higher a site ranks for a given keyword or search term, the better its chances of attracting more visitors to its site.

Why You Should Care about SEO

If you run a business and have a web presence, don’t you want the most people possible knowing about that business? Wouldn’t it benefit you if your website was able to bring you new leads or develop new customers every day, 24 hours per day? Research has shown that nearly 95% of all search engine users rarely read past the first page of search results. Because of that, it behooves you to have your website on the first page of search results for specific keywords and terms.

Can’t I just Pay for a High Ranking?

No! Organic (or “free”) search listing rankings cannot be purchased. These are “earned” over time via links, content, keyword relevance, page and site descriptions, titles of pages, etc. You can pay for clicks to your website based on specific terms or keywords however these are separate results from the free results people commonly click.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click is a form of internet advertising where you pay a certain amount for each “click” or “hit” to your website as a result of a person searching for a certain keyword or phrase.

Click Fraud

Click fraud occurs when a person or automated computer script imitates a legitimate search for a keyword or phrase yet clicks on the pay-per-click result for the sole purpose of generating revenue for the search engine or affiliate.

Linking Partner

A linking partner is a website which provides a link to your site. Some will require a link on your site to theirs in return (a reciprocal link) while others will want to have a link on a third party’s site in exchange for the link to yours. Reciprocal links aren’t as valuable as unique one way links but the more links you have pointing to your site (link popularity), the more “important” the search engines will consider your site.

Page Rank

Page Rank is Google’s proprietary algorithm for determining a site’s importance. It’s expressed as a value from 1-10 with 10 being the most important and most desirable. The algorithm was designed by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. Page Rank is affected primarily by the number of links pointing to your website and the quality of the sites providing those links.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a typical word or phrase you’d expect people to use when searching for your site. That’s about as simple as we can explain it.

Keyword Density

The number of keywords you use on a particular page in relation to the number of total words on that page. The more keywords you have peppered throughout the page and site, the better your site may rank for that particular term. You must be careful not to load a page with too many keywords, however—that is considered keyword “stuffing” or spamming and is frowned upon by the search engines.

Sitemap

A sitemap is basically an inventory listing of all of the pages on your site. It tells the search engines how to get around your site and also how many pages there are on your site. It can be made visible to your visitors, but it doesn’t have to be. Uploading an XML file directly to the search engines is a generally accepted best practice for optimizing your search engine rankings.

Spider

Search engines utilize small programs to surf and inventory sites all over the internet. These are called spiders, and they follow links from site to site to gather their inventory to report back to the search engine. They are also referred to as crawlers or bots from time to time.

Meta Tag

A meta tag is an HTML piece of code which provides information about that particular page or document. These don’t provide formatting information or any actionable code—they are there for the search engines to catalog your site and the pages contained on your site.

Blog

A blog (short for weblog) is a news or journal type of site which is frequently used more for opinionated type of entries and is typically updated frequently. It is intended for general consumption but has become a valuable tool for all types of users to spread information and awareness of their websites.

Writing Articles

Articles are a great way to increase the amount of unique content on your site as it pertains to the keywords you desire to rank well. There are numerous websites that publish articles, and it is common practice for the authors to include a link in their by-line back to their website. This creates an inbound link to the author’s website which in turn increases its popularity. It’s also a good way to increase awareness aside from the linking benefits.

Web Directories

Directories are databases containing listings to websites based on categories and sub-categories. Many of the search engines access directories to crawl their links to learn of new sites. Directories are an invaluable resource for search engines and can often serve to improve a site’s ranking depending upon how important the search engine weighs the directory in question. Directories may provide a link to your site often without requiring a return or reciprocal link on your site.

There you have a beginning look at SEO.