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Marketing Tips November 2008
Boost Your Site’s Credibility, Google Ranking, and Traffic…with Organic Search Engine OptimizationLast month, we looked at tips for making your site more attractive to search engines (not to mention earning Chamber advertising discounts!) by using reciprocal links. This month, I’d like to explain a little more about search engine optimization as it relates to crafting the content on your site. Why? Because organic search engine optimization (OSEO) is one of the best ways to give your site credibility with the search engines and draw in targeted traffic. In using OSEO, you have two goals: To prove to the search engines that your site provides high-quality, relevant content on its stated topic, thus moving it closer to the top of the listings; To include in your content the keywords that people are most likely to use when they search for products or services like yours – thus ensuring that your site shows up in those search results! So, for example, let’s say your site is OrganicPetFoods.com, and you want it to show up when people search for pet food, organic pet food, organic foods, pet supplies, pet health, etc. Logically, you need to include those words, and related words, in your content. This is not to say that you should have a paragraph like this: When you shop for pet foods, you should only buy organic pet food because organic foods are among the highest-quality pet foods you can purchase for optimum pet health. This is called “cramming” the keywords, a practice that will indeed catch the notice of rudimentary search engines, but will rapidly lose the interest of any intelligent person who clicks on that link. Google, like a savvy reader, picks up on this spamlike practice also, and rewards it with a low ranking. Instead, you need to gather your keywords into logical groupings, and use one grouping per page in a natural flow. Where your home page might start by discussing organic pet foods generally, you could have subsequent individual pages dealing with organic cat foods, organic dog foods, etc. You could have a page addressing the question “why organic?” and one providing “organic resources” for those seeking more information. And so forth… Sounds fairly simple, right? In principle it’s not difficult at all…until you start looking at the best keywords to include. If 99% of organic pet food suppliers are focusing their sites on the words “organic pet food” and there are 10,000 competing sites using those three keywords, how quickly do you think your site will rise to the top? Certainly, a large number of good incoming links and high-quality content will help, but it’s also important to choose your keywords strategically. Fortunately, Google comes to your aid with a package of (literally) priceless OSEO products: • Google Analytics (http://www.googleanalytics.com ) – when you install the snippet of code from this tool on your website, Google will analyze the number of visitors who come to your site, which site or search engine sent them to you, the keywords they used, and much, much more. This is the best tool you can add to your site to see how it is performing and how you can improve that performance. • Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) – using this tool, you can evaluate the popularity of any keyword or keyphrase by year, country, city, and language. • Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ) – while Google Adwords is designed for Pay Per Click campaigns, it also offers a standalone Keyword Generator which is perfect for suggesting keywords and gauging their level of searches and competition. Once you have identified relevant keywords with plenty of searches but few competitors, you’ll want to add these to the appropriate pages on your site. It’s important to do this for every page of your site, so Google can index every page, thus giving your visitors multiple points of entry. Obviously this is an “OSEO Lite” explanation – but it will give you what you need at least to get started. Feel free to contact Meghan Carpenter (meghan@dragonfly-design.com) or myself (phila@your-words-worth.com) if you get stuck. And remember, reciprocal links will give you both search engine credibility and Chamber advertising discounts! Don’t forget to collect your Chamber logo at http://www.catonsville.org/members.html and post it on your website with a link to www. catonsville.org. Phila Hoopes
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