How to Optimize your Site with SEO Tactics

“SEO is the business of getting found; even if a user didn’t know they were looking for your site all along!”

Did you know…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a component of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). 

SEO is the act of optimizing a website for organic (also called natural) search engine listings. The idea of optimizing a website for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers for a specific purpose: to make a purchase, contribute to a blog, etc. The higher the site is ranked in the results, the greater amount of traffic directed to the website.   Organic listings within search engines are very popular because they receive anywhere between 3 to 10 times more traffic than paid listings!  This makes SEO extremely cost effective.  Optimizing a site is essential to its existence on the Internet and for receiving more free targeted traffic without paying a penny! This can save site owners up to thousands of dollars every month. 

So, you are probably asking “How can I optimize my site?”  Below are just a few of the most immediate ways to optimize a site: 

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  • Page Content- The more relevant the site content is to the search made, the higher the site will appear in the search results.  This process involves far more than simply repeating a key phrase several times.
    • How does this happen? By what are commonly referred to as Search Engine “Crawlers or Spiders.” When a search is performed by a user on a search engine, a crawler skims the site for content that is relevant to the keyword passed.  The crawler realizes the keyword as it is repeated fairly often.  Crawlers use this information to return sites for this particular keyword.

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  • HTML Coding– Be sure that the code is free of any errors.
    • Title Tag- Title tags, technically called title elements, define the title of a document and are required for all HTML/XHTML documents. A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title tags are the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appear in these key places:
      • Browser- Title Tags show up in both the top of all browsers and in applicable tabs.
         
      • Search Results Pages- Title tags also show up in search engine results.  In this example you can see the title tag's contents are displayed directly below the link:
        
        

• Inbound Links- For a site to truly succeed, a major part of the site’s SEO strategy must focus on the importance of inbound links. Google explains that, "The best way to ensure Google finds your site, is for your pages to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to yours; the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly.” 

A truly successful website uses a mixture of both SEO and SEM to anchor their overall Internet marketing strategy.