Keys to Effective Search Engine Marketing

Lately, I've been getting a lot of emails about search engine marketing -- and it seems that maybe we've forgotten that getting the basics in place is still a good idea.   Have you examined your page titles, keyword focus, and description on each page lately?  If you've recently changed or added content to some of your pages, it's likely your page title, keywords, and description for that page also need to be changed.

Have you recently checked your ranking for your most important keywords -- and then checked out what all of the sites ranked above you are doing in terms of SEO?   SEO isn't a "set it up once and forget it" effort -- it should be addressed at least monthly.

What about your keywords themselves?   Have you checked their search volume lately?   Have you looked to see what other keywords may be hot right now and generatng more search volume?  

Selecting the keywords your site will focus on is now a much more far-reaching decision that it has been in the past.  Every press release you send out, every blog post you make, every Twitter tweet you make -- all should be supporting those keywords on which you focus.

Here are some of the best practices for Search Engine Optimization that we continue to rely on:

1.  For press releases or articles on your site, put each on a separate web page, and include the title of the item in the URL.  Be sure the title includes keywords your target audience uses when searching for information.  And separate the words in the title with underscores:

www.SMAresource.com/2009articles/SEO_Best_Practices.asp

2.  Create a unique page title (the line of information that appears at the very top of your browser window, above the browser menu) that includes frequently-searched keywords.  Every page of your site should have a unique page title -- the page title tells the search engine spider what the page is about, and pages with the same title tell the spider those pages may not have to be indexed individually if they contain the same information.  The page title also appears as the headline in Google search results.  For example, a page title for the web page that displays this article might read:

SEO Best Practices

3.  Put your most important keywords -- those frequently-searched words or phrases or current hot topics -- at the beginning of your page title, at the beginning of your page URL, at the beginning of your page headline, and in the first few words of the article or press release.

4.  Promote your key stories by using social media sites, to generate links back to the story on your web site.  (Two benefits here:  links to your site are very valuable for SEO purposes, and summaries of your stories on sites like Digg will help generate more traffic to your site.)

 5.  Use Twitter to expose your latest content to a wider audience, as well as create links back to content on your web site. 



http://www.smaresource.com/