Five Ways to Make SEO Work for You

How much attention do you pay to search engine optimization? Many marketers give it short shrift, not understanding that it can be the difference between success and failure.

Here are five tips that will help you put SEO to work for you.

1. Develop good, high-quality content. Before you pull visitors into your site through SEO, you should first have a foundation of first-rate content that has relevant benefit to your visitors. Implementing SEO practices before making your site a useful stop for consumers means they will likely leave just as quickly as they came.

2. Use searchable, rational keywords. Now that the foundation is laid, you need to have the right amount of keyword density. First of all, remember to not put too many keywords onto your Web pages, as some search engines will label your site as spam for having too many. Five% or less keyword density is a good amount.

To build up your keyword density, replace generic terms with keywords specific to your industry. For example, Avidian’s homepage contains the header “Compare CRM Software” rather than a more generic phrase such as “Compare Competitors.” This helps get the right message to customers and search engines alike.

3. Build relevant external links. Getting other influential Web sites to link back to you can equate to as much as 70% of your SEO efforts.

Here are a few current best practices when building external links:

· Relevant content: Develop articles and other content that others will want to display and link to on their sites.

· Pay for it: Serve as a sponsor on an applicable site.

· Say please: Ask nicely and hopefully they will link to your site because they want to support you.

4. Build relevant internal links. Building relevant internal links is a much easier process yet it is still important. Including numerous internal links on all of your Web pages to other places on your site is essentially giving search engines suggestions of the most important pages on your site.

When building internal links you should keep these tips in mind:

· Use HTML for inbound links: Search engines don’t like Flash and Java, stick with HTML links.

· Link from your most important pages: Search engines give more credence to links on home pages.

· Link to pages using relevant keywords: Consider what you are using for your anchor text. For example, rather than saying, “For more information, click here,” place the link within a sentence containing the name of the product.

5. Track and review your data to continuously improve. In order to continually improve your SEO processes, you need to understand the consumer behavior on your site. At Avidian, we’re constantly looking at what keywords are bringing people to us, where the traffic is coming from, what pages they are visiting and what actions they are taking. This helps us determine how we can further improve our SEO efforts.

http://chiefmarketer.com/online_marketing/search/seo_0617/