Search engines work hard to send their visitors to relevant sites, but if you don't work hard to attract the search engine's attention, your website investment isn't being maximized. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is a constantly developing specialty field. We strongly recommend seeking the services of one of our trusted SEO experts. Send a quick message to support@pdgo.com to get started.
SEO packages usually cost less money than the annual cost of newspaper or phone book or any other print marketing. Marketing gurus claim that it is also money better spent as print marketing is becoming less and less effective.
Here are a few things you can do yourself to begin your search engine optimization:
1) Submit your site to the search Engines: Complete the form at http://www.orangesubmit.com to submit your site to most popular search engines.
2) Assign relevant global and page specific keywords: If you have a page that specializes in a particular service or product, than the keywords should be relevant to that content. SEO experts recommend no more than 20 keywords or phrases. If you use a lot of phrases it is helpful to place a comma between each keyword or phrase.
3) Use keywords in the body text of the page: The search engines use complicated algorithms to find content on the internet that is most closely relate to what people are searching for. If you have a keyphrase of "web design", then legitimately using that word several times throughout the content of the page will legitimize that keyphrase in the eyes of the search engine robots that are scouring your site for data.
4) Have outside websites link to your site: Having multiple links to your website give you credibility with the search engines. If 100 sites are linking to you, your website is obviously useful to many people and therefore your business is probably legitimate in the eyes of the search engine.
5) Update your content often: A static site does not receive as much traffic from search engine robots and therefore is less likely to have good placement. Regularly updated sites will keep the search engine robots coming back regularly to keep their data up-to-date. Blogs that resolve to your domain are a great way to do keep content fresh and updated regularly.
6) Use social media to drive traffic to your site: Social media interaction is a must in today's mobile web culture. Link to your site from your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter profile, and from your website back to those services.
7) Create a local listing: Google and Bing put their free local listings at the top of their search results, so this is a way to quickly increase traffic to your site. Make sure to spend plenty of time adding as much relevant content to your listing as possible. This will help your placement. Create a Bing Local Listing. Create a Google Local Listing.
8) Sit and Wait: There is a lot of sitting and waiting with SEO updates as these type of changes sometimes take up to a month or so to reveal results on the Search Engine lists. Be patient.
This list is intentionally simplistic. For a comprehensive list see the Google Search Engine Optimization Guidelines.
