Using SEO effectively for small businesses

A medical firm's experience with a carefully planned SEO effort gave a serious fillip to its business. This Marketing Sherpa article is especially important for smaller and more localized business operations.

The key leanings are...

- Finding your niche.  Starting with the obvious keywords based on the basic work that the organization is into. But keeping a constant look out for more pointed keywords that are high traffic and low competition in nature. Geo- tagging seems to help here as it helps you to be found when the user is closer to purchase decision and is looking for options closer home. 

- Constant research The team spoke to their frontline staff and found out specific language used by clients when they called or were called out to. They also used Analytics to keep a check on their efforts and for further refinement. 

- Site repair and basic architecture It's imp to know where the basic architecture of the site is creating issues...404 issues, multiple URL instead of a central landing page etc

- Localizing your site Add geo tags throughout the site. Mentioning nearby locations, office addresses persistently all across the site gets you found in the local searches.  The Contact Us page is also an imp page to have if localization and geographical placement benefits the overall search success. 

- Header and footer Work on the page title. Make it relevant to what the page content is about. If possible add some localization element to the description of the page. Metadata needs to be updated and can local area name as well.

- On site SEO factors Creating internal links between internal pages gives them some weight to the search engine. What you need is intelligent use of keywords in the tagging process. Images with alt tags is another imp addition that helps. 

- Off site link building Encouraging partners and vendors to link back to your site, using Google places and Maps to input relevant info about your location and using local search/directory listings can be another way of getting the show across. 

Find the Marketing Sherpa article here

Google will institute a ranking penalty for sites that are overly optimized.

Refer to the article - Google Previews a change to natural search - http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/03/22/google-previews-upcoming-change-natural-search-rankings

As we know that how SEO is important to rank a particular webpage tops in the organic search results, however, Google is making changes to natural search within the next few weeks or months by penalising sites that are overly optimised. 

Though this new proposal is to reward websites that offer good content and positive user experience, companies who need to rank tops by adopting keyword stuffing or black hat link building will most likely suffer. New websites that need to quickly rank tops in the organic result would adopting such illegitimate methods. In a highly competitive market, making one searchable is very critical to a business when most of the customers would first search in a search engine before buying a product or service.

The Fine Art Of SEO Optimization for Blogs

Search Optimization is at the heart of people finding your blog. If they don’t get to it, they’re not going to be reading it, right? Design, Analytics, SEO tactics…pushing a blog is the new fine art in town.

Author Markup @ Google, using Double Click planner, use of large Images to attract the user, QnA sites and being seen and read there are just a few of the things that are now being employed by astute bloggers (or blogger groups like Mashable, Huffington Post and Life Hacker)

Just read a great article with lots of advanced insights into promoting a blog. Anybody entering the field needs to read this Search EngineJournal piece.