Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most powerful, modern day marketing strategy for businesses to improve their online exposure, drive qualified traffic and significantly increase their return on investment.
Unlike traditional forms of advertising where you pay large sums of money to place your brand in front of a wide and not necessarily qualified audience, SEO points interested consumers directly to your website where you showcase your product or service.
SEO helps you to attract qualified visitors who are actively researching and making buying decisions, to your website as the leading search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use “crawlers” to find pages for their algorithmic search results, relating to your customers keywords.
Think about when you search online for something yourself…whether you are looking for a service provider or researching your next big purchase, you type-in specific keywords that relate to what you are looking for…you may scroll down beyond the paid advertisements but you rarely go pass the first page and top 10 listings. Even if you have not found what you are looking for, you are more likely to redefine your search keywords and criteria than continue past the first few pages.
Cornell University recently conducted a survey studying user behavior and Search Engines. The results found that over 89% of customers clicked on one of the non-paid search results ranking between the first and fifth position on the first page.
This means that if you are not listed on the first page or even in the top half of the first page, you business is suffering from a lack of exposure and traffic, while your competitors are enjoying the returns of higher rankings.
Social Proofing not only examines your organization’s SEO and sales objectives but makes every effort to understand the psychology of your customer, their search engine user behaviour as well as your competitor’s approach to maximize the number of quality leads to your website and convert them into sales.
Social Proofing employs a variety of methods that can be used to increase the prominence of your webpage within search results:
ESTABLISHING –
- Keyword rich text & layout structure
- URL normalization & permalink structure
- Clean HTML coding
- Keyword rich images
- Sitemaps
OPTIMIZING through –
- Back & Cross Linking:
Mention your new page with an anchor text link, and update a previously indexed page to include the link (make sure it fits naturally with the content though).
‘Deep linking’ to new pages on your website is not just about building external backlinks. It is also important to build links within your website, which will alert search engines to the presence of new content on your site quickly.
- Niche Engagement:
Actively engage with authority blogs and blogs with an active readership within your topic field. This not only helps you build brand equity but new content is crawled regularly by search engines. By commenting on new posts on these blogs you can ‘piggyback’ off their popularity and get your own pages indexed quickly.
This is a very effective way of getting new pages indexed fast – just make sure you use the page you want indexed as your website URL when commenting, and not simply the homepage of your website.
- Web page Meta Data/Tags
- RSS Feeds
- Bookmarking:
One of the fastest ways to get new content indexed is to use social bookmarking and social services. Many websites fall under this category, but some you may be more familiar with are, Facebook, Twitter, Digg.com and Reddit.com. These are sites where people come together to share and discuss interesting things they have found on the Internet.
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Directory Submissions
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Article Marketing:
Not only are articles useful for generating backlinks, but they are also very handy for getting new pages or websites indexed.
Because article directories are such busy sites, new content tends to be indexed by search engines very rapidly. If you include a link to your new page or website then that link will be followed by search engine spiders. And it should get indexed fairly quickly.
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Press Releases
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Social Media Networking:
There are hundreds of social media platforms to help optimize your search engine ranking.
Twitter offers another means of getting a page or website indexed quickly. Create a Tweet to send out to your followers that contains a link to the page you want indexed. You may even get some traffic too!
Use Facebook in a similar manner – update your status and include a link to your site or page. Be careful not to violate the Facebook terms and conditions and consider how often you share commercially related content. Social Proofing believes a healthy ratio = 1/3 “personal” information : 1/3 “general” information : 1/3 “business” promotion
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Video Marketing:
Video content has been on lists of hot or important SEO and marketing tactics for at least the last three years but the media has still not reached its full potential for ecommerce marketing.
Consumers are clearly comfortable with videos online and favorably disposed to watching them.
Video — both promoting products and offering entertainment — makes good content, potentially attracting new customers. It gives shoppers more, and often better, product information. When used regularly to entertain and engage, it can build relationships, and video is very easy to share on Facebook or Google+.
MAINTAINING –
- Refreshing and updating copy:
Making sure you update your website regularly with fresh content is important for getting new pages indexed. If search engines get the impression that your website is going ‘stale’, they will be unlikely to crawl your pages regularly. On the other hand, if you keep your website fresh and updated (even updating indexed pages) then search engine spiders will keep coming back.
Part of the reason why many blogs rank well in search engines and have new posts indexed quickly is because bloggers update their sites frequently with new content. Updating traditional websites with new pages tends to take longer than creating blog posts, so it can be harder to keep content fresh.
You should not be uploading new pages to your website until they are finished either. Resist the temptation to create a new page, and then upload it in an unfinished form. If search engine spiders visit a page that is not finished, it could wind up being flagged for poor quality content.
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