There is a lot of search engine optimization (SEO) advice floating around out there on the internet, some good, some not so good. But this comes straight from the horses mouth. Matt Cutts, a Google engineer and well know search engine optimization guru recently shared some basic SEO advice with USA Today.
Here’s a summary … and I’ve added some comments below. In fact, each of these five points individually is deserving of it’s own future blog posts … so stay tuned.
- On each page, use your best search terms appropriate for that page in the content of the page, weaving them in naturally in the content of the page.
- Use appropriate title tags and description tags for each page.
- Get other appropriate sites to link back to you to raise your site’s popularity / page rank.
- Start a blog and make regular updates to the blog.
- Use free tools such as site maps and Google’s local business center, if you’re a local company, to get listed on google maps.
So if you’ve ever talked to me about websites, you’ll know that Baer Marketing sings the same song. In fact, for items 1 and 2 above, we automatically build in target keywords on your pages when we build your website. And we assure that you have good meta tags to go along with each page.
For those of you who aren’t yet Baer Marketing clients, we can help you rewrite the content of critical pages and update your website for you to accomplish these important Google recommended optimization tasks. Many sites are actually designed by graphic artists who do great visual work, but who fail to understand the critical importance of properly marketing and optimizing a website for search engines. Baer Marketing, however, approaches every website task from a marketing perspective first.
For Google’s 3rd recommendation, getting other sites to link back to you, Baer Marketing has always recommended an ongoing link marketing campaign. But this has always been a rather intangible and hard to understand endeavor, so it has never gained much traction among most website owners. When a website is completed, even when it is built exceptionally well, that is when marketing should begin, not end.
Linking, however, can be a tricky game. It has to be done correctly because there are many potential pitfalls involved. Among those pitfalls are too many links too quickly, non-relevant links, link farms, and many more. Linking, in fact, is so important and both potentially rewarding and dangerous, that I’ll have to do another post solely about linking. Meanwhile, feel free to contact us to discuss setting up a link building program for your website.
Matt Cutt’s fourth recommendation is blogging. For most industrial and contractor companies that I work with, this is a wholly new concept and not yet widely used in these sectors. So now is the time to be a leader in your field and get ahead of the competition. Baer Marketing would be happy to help you set up a blog correctly so that the content you post is actually considered an ever expanding part of your website.
And finally, Google’s Matt Cutts recommends site maps and getting featured on google maps. For many small 5-10 page websites that rarely change, a site map is not always necessary. Your basic navigation menu essentially serves as a site map. For those small website I’ve designed, every page always get indexed on the major search engines, even without sitemaps. And we can always look up the last time that Google, Yahoo or MSN.com reindexed the various pages. But for larger websites, sitemaps are very important and we’re glad to help you out with those.
Getting featured on the business listings on google maps is a task that I have not yet done with my more localized clients. The link above can help you do that on your own. But we’re also glad to help you with that task.
So as you can see, I’m not the only one suggesting that search engine friendly steps should be taken. Again, once a website is completed is when marketing the site needs to truly begin. The website can only go so far on it’s own merits, which are basically steps 1 and 2 recommended above. After that, marketing a website takes time and effort if you do it on your own or a small investment if you hire Baer Marketing to do these tasks for you. We would love to hear your feedback and comments on this post and on any other marketing methods that you have found successful. Thanks for reading!