SEO – Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to placement, everyone knows that organic Search Engine Optimization is the key to acquiring visitors for very little cost. In fact, SEO services are absolutely vital to your search engine marketing success. As a result, every company wants to have the top search engine ranking for their targeted keywords, but who will succeed? Only the most sophisticated companies can compete. Because after all, Google continues to invest, innovate, and take their technology to a higher level, and therefore, so must your search engine marketing company.

SEO

 

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of gaining more organic traffic to your website.  In order to achieve a high position in organic search (also known as natural or unpaid search), there are a number of tactics that can help your website be found and indexed by the search engines.  Your website’s content, HTML and site architecture all play a vital role in what Google or Yahoo/Bing can display for their search results.  There are also off-page SEO factors.  For instance, the quality and quantity of links to your site is the primary factor in Page Rank.  Your online social reputation, Facebook likes and Google+ followers, can also be highly weighted.  SEO is highly cost effective and with some initial investment and maintenance your website can gain visibility and authority with search engines.  Here are only a few best practices for SEO:

Titles and Descriptions

Optimizing title tags on each page of your website is extremely important, second only to the actual content on the page.  The title is displayed on the search results page and is a primary indicator to search engines what content is on your web page.  Also, having a relevant description (text under the title) to accompany your title is quite important as it should match the offerings you have in the title.  It’s very important to have unique titles and descriptions for each page of your site so search engines can differentiate between them and reward you for the unique content you have created.

 SEO

Link Building & Content Creation

The quality and relevance of sites linking to yours can greatly help or hinder your indexing in the search engines.  Having duplicate content on multiple domains that link to your site is something that potentially can harm your organic listings.  Google, with its continued algorithm changes, has punished websites for attempting these “black hat” tactics by cleaning them from the search results, cutting off the traffic they receive.  Content creation is the primary “white hat” tactic that will help your website with quality links.  For example, creating blog postings, YouTube videos, whitepapers and press releases will likely always be valued by the search engines as quality content and establish you as an authority in your business’s category.  The more quality content you create, the more opportunity for improving position in search results.

Site Architecture

Search engines crawl web sites, going from one page to another.  Establishing logical site architecture will help them understand your website.  Using sitemaps will help ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that Google cannot find by automatically following links.  You should have clear headers (H1 tags come before H2 tags, then H3, etc.) that tell the engine’s the hierarchy of your page content.  Having slow site speed can also impair search engines from getting to all the pages on your site.  Even the description of the URL can be a factor in getting a better search result ranking.

For example:

http://www.website.com/seo-services/site-architecture

Is much more descriptive and compelling than

http://www.website.com/p-756

What CarmichaelMarketing.com Offers:

Organic search engine optimization is a long-term investment with multiple layers.  SEO requires a deep understanding of search engine methodology, competitive and keyword analysis and HTML enhancements.  This is the kind of expertise that CarmichaelMarketing.com can provide to your business.