One of the Marketing Track sessions I attended at the GrowSmartBiz Conference had a great title–Stories, Content, and the Search Engine Sword Over Your Head–and delivered useful information in spades. No matter how new or established your business, this session was a great way to learn exactly how to improve your search engine optimization efforts and results.
Ben Cook, the SEO Manager at Network Solutions, moderated the panel of 4 pros, including Tinu Abayomi-Paul, principal of Leveraged Promotion, Dr. Alan Glazier, founder and owner of Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care, Deborah Ager, principal of ClickWisdom, LLC, and Liana Evans, CEO of LiBeck Integrated Marketing. (You might be curious as to why there’s an optometrist on the panel. Dr. Grazier has successfully implemented SEO at Shady Grove Eye and become a prolific blogger in the process.)
Here are their tips on using great content to boost your website’s search engine optimization:
Write for your audience! To produce great content specific to your audience, you need to understand what they search for when online. Use Market Samurai, a keyword analysis tool, to help you figure what people are searching for. Then you will be able to write content that addresses their needs.
Use long-tail search terms in your content. Long-tail search terms are the descriptive keywords people enter in the search box when they’re conducting research online. For instance, “children’s navy blue cotton jacket” rather than “children’s jackets”. The more pages your website has, the more content you’ll have, and the more chances you’ll have at being found for long-tail terms.
Content type is important. Blogs, videos, and podcasts are great for search engine optimization, thanks to plenty of chances for back linking (aka, links from other sites). All search engines, including Google and Bing, measure how often content is linked and how many views it gets, so the more varied your content, the better.
Make it easy to share content. Twitter makes sharing content and getting links easy as your content is spread from one person to the next. On your blog, make sure you add “tweet this” and “like” buttons. Google rewards websites that have links back to it from both new and established websites.
Optimize video and podcasts. Because search engines cannot read videos or podcasts, add a transcript.
The importance of the URL. You can create custom URL shorteners for branding purposes (I had no idea!). Awe.sm is the first company I found in search results that does this. Also be sure that your blog’s URLs contain the title of the blog post rather than numbers.
Photo Courtesy Shashi Bellamkonda
Google+Web.com is now offering forums designed to support small businesses in cities throughout the US. Learn more about these forums here: http://Businessforum.web.com/
Tags: GrowSmartBiz Conference, Marketing, podcasts, search engine optimization, small busines, video marketing, website content
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