SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of optimizing specific aspects of web pages in order to increase the overall traffic from the search engines. The majority of website traffic comes from the search engines, and if your site isn’t being found, then you can be losing out on incredible opportunities.

The benefits of SEO are numerous, but today we’re only going to focus on six areas: usability, code, rankings, traffic, cost and brand visibility.

Usability

The usability of any website is extremely important, not only from a search engine perspective but also from the users’ point-of-view. SEO can bring a lot of new aspects to the development table that will increase both the search engine results and the user experience.

User Experience

Even if your website gets tons of visits, if you’re not converting users, then the traffic is worthless. Making sure your users have a good experience is what separates a typical website from a site they’ll continue to use.

Examples of issues that can create a bad user experience:

• No prices or requiring users to call for prices
• Minimal or incomplete descriptions of products
• Poor quality images or no pictures at all
• Inconsistent navigation
• Poor organization

Search engine optimization is all about being thorough, so give your visitors all the details they’ll need and your site will be seen as an informative, user-friendly resource.

Clean Code

SEO is not the sole reason to strive for clean code, but it does go hand in hand with sites that are coded efficiently. Websites can be developed in numerous languages and techniques, and some methods are going to be better than others when it comes to search engine rankings.

A site that utilizes clean and semantic markup is typically going to outperform a site that doesn’t. Adhering to SEO guidelines is going to give your markup a more defined outline as well as making the hierarchy more clear to your users and the search engines. Document heading outlines, navigation, URLs and category management are all going to be indicators to your users on the architecture of your website. Make sure that your website is organized in a logical fashion no matter where you enter.

Search Engine Rankings

Optimizing websites for search engines means that your sites are going to be in front of your users when they’re ready. Most other forms of advertising are time and location sensitive and can mean your potential customers will never see your beautiful ad.

Examples of time and location-sensitive advertising:

• Magazine ad (hope they buy the issue, read it, see your ad and act on it)
• Billboard ad (hope they drive down that road, read the billboard and know what they’re supposed to do)
• Commercial (hope they’re watching TV, that channel and ready to let the info soak in)

Of course, all of these mediums have been used effectively for years, but there are also a lot of variables that can limit your ability to capture the attention of the audience.

24/7 Results

The nice thing about search engines and online sales is that your website doesn’t close, so your site can generate traffic and sales 24/7. Effective search engine optimization helps your site make the most of this advantage.

Long-Term Results

We hear a lot about search engine rankings and algorithms changing, and to be a good SEO you have to constantly know what Google is doing. While for the most part that’s true, you don’t have to spend all your time keeping up with the newest SEO techniques in order to get good rankings. A site that’s optimized with ethical, white hat SEO techniques can do very well on the search engines for a long time. As long as you follow a few basic rules, all of your sites can do well.

Targeted Traffic

Ideally, when writing content you’re optimizing the web pages for specific keywords and phrases. I see a lot of companies that don’t even think about keyword phrases until after all the content is written and the site is live. They wonder while they’re not showing up for “keyword phrase A,” and the phrase isn’t even mentioned in the content.

A huge benefit to SEO is that you actually control what kind of traffic your website is going to generate. By doing keyword research, you’ll be able to analyze which terms generate traffic and which terms will be the most beneficial to your company’s goals.

Keyword research can also give your company an indication on how the average consumer talks about your products or services. Many times, companies think their customers talk about them using certain, specific words, only to find—through keyword research—that they actually refer to you slightly differently. If you had known the alternate way your customers referred to your products, then you could have included that verbiage in the content to generate more traffic.

Cost-Effective

Having to pay a qualified SEO writer to do keyword research and optimize content can turn a lot of companies off, but if you look at the long-term costs, it’s a much better ROI than PPC (Pay Per Click) or other forms of online advertising.

Of course, having an in-house SEO is going to be the most cost-effective way to keep updating your website with quality content, but if you have to outsource the writing, then it can potentially be a one-time fee. Obviously, the more active you are in your SEO campaign the better you’ll do over the years, but if you’re looking to just get started, then optimizing the content once a year and then analyzing the results on a quarterly basis can be very cost-effective.

PPC can be a good way to generate quick traffic, and it definitely has its place for certain types of campaigns; but if you opt to only participate in PPC, then your advertising budget is going to continue to increase as the year goes on.

The budget throughout your PPC campaign is going to depend on a lot of factors. Cost of keywords, how many keywords, how targeted your content is for that particular keyword, how long the campaign runs. You could easily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for multiple campaigns.

SEO can be a one-time fee that can pay for itself in just a few months, leaving the rest of the year generating profits on every sale. You can target as many keywords as you like without having to worry about how expensive each keyword is. Additionally, SEO doesn’t need the kind of hand-holding and ongoing monitoring that PPC can require, which gives you and your staff the flexibility to focus on other tasks.

Brand Visibility

If I search for your company name, I should find your site on the search engines. That’s a given, that’s not SEO. If you’re not found for your company name then you should fire who ever created your website and start over.

The real benefit of SEO when it comes to brand visibility is when a user searches for a general topic and your site comes into their results. For example, if I searched for “Forklift Parts” and you sold forklift parts, wouldn’t you want your site to be on page one of Google? Is it? Have you even checked?

If you take the time to create unique content on a consistent basis, you can begin to dominate the search engines for many variations of your targeted keyword phrases. Each time you create a new piece of content, you’ll generate a new listing in Google’s index. The more indexed pages you have, the more places you’ll show up in front of your customers. With a well-optimized campaign, your customers won’t be able to get away from you.

Conclusion

The Internet offers a wealth of business potential, and it is important for companies to take advantage of it. This means making sure your websites and everything you put online are optimized. SEO is a great way to put your company in front of your users and generate more leads and sales. The benefits of SEO are endless, but these six areas should be enough to get you thinking about what your current site is missing. Get started optimizing your website today with SEO and watch your rankings, sales and profits grow.

Do you find yourself struggling when it comes to finding new ways to research keywords?

Sure there are a lot of good tools out there but if you think about your keyword research in a logical manner than chances are you’re going to get the same keywords as everyone else.

Wordtracker, one of the industry’s most used keyword research tools is more than just a tool. Wordtracker also has an academy section that references numerous ways to get more creative with your keyword research.

The Wordtracker academy has various sections on:

• Keywords
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Creativity
• PPC
• SEO
• Link Building

The next time you have to research keywords for a new site, try thinking about things in an illogical manner. Often times you can stumble across keywords that have a lot of traffic with very little competition.

We’ve all heard that quality inbound links are one of the biggest influencer’s when it comes to search engine rankings, but don’t forget about quality cross links too. Treat your cross links the same way you would treat your inbound links and your website will get better rankings.

The easiest way to make sure that your cross links are giving you the most search engine value is to keep an organized list of your keyword distribution in front of you when you are writing new pages.

When writing page A, link to page B with the keywords that are assigned to page B. By doing this you will always create a quality cross link. Use as many keywords as you can when cross linking throughout your website and please, never use click here. You’re not trying to rank for click here, so DON”T USE IT.

For other SEO Quick Tips, check out our Title Tag and Meta Descriptions tips.

Following up on my last SEO tip, SEO Quick Tip: Title Tags, today’s SEO quick tip deals with the meta description tag. The meta description tag is in the head section of every webpage and is a short description of the content on the page.

Second to the title tag, the meta description tag is the biggest influence in whether or not a user will click on your listing. If your description is well written and accurately describes the content, then you can easily increase your CTR (click through rate).

The meta description is usually only displayed on the search engine results page, but can also be seen if you view the source of any webpage. Here are a few examples:

Meta description on search results page:

Meta description in the source code:

<meta name="description" content="this is where the description goes" />

Meta Description Guidelines:

Just like the title tag, the meta description tag has a few guidelines that you’ll want to follow to achieve the best results.

1. The meta description has a character limit. For each search engine, the parameters are going to vary. I like to stay around 140 characters with spaces. You can push it up to 155 characters on Google, but you take a chance that your description will be cut off. You can see in the example above where the description has “…” at the end, this represents that it has been truncated.
2. Meta descriptions should be marketing style copy. Since this snippet of content is what’s going to entice a user to click on your listing and you only have a certain number of characters, its best to craft your description with everyday language. Don’t try and stuff your descriptions will keywords and industry jargon that could potentially confuse or turn off the user.
3. Unique descriptions for every page. Just like the title tag, your meta descriptions need to be unique for every single page on your website. Duplicate descriptions can send the wrong message to Google as well as your users. Google might think that the pages are duplicate and only index one page. A user can get confused because both listings look identical and they may simply skip over them completely.

Use those helpful site operators to analyze all of your meta descriptions in one swoop. Type “site:www.yourdomainname.com” into Google without the quotes and read all of your descriptions.

Are they an accurate representation of what content is on the page? Do they entice you to click on the listing? If not, then go back through your pages and re-write them.

Sitemap pages are a great way to let the search engines know what content is on your website. But what kind of sitemap are you using?

You could use a regular page from your website, an HTML, PHP, ASP, or whatever type of page will work. These pages are great for users because they list all of the pages in your website. Ideally, you would also include a description for each page so a user would know what they’re going to get when they click the link, instead of just a word that lists the page names.

These pages will help the search engines but not nearly as much as an XML Sitemap. An XML Sitemap is a page that you can literally upload to the search engines to let them know specifically what pages you have on your website instead of waiting for them to find all of your pages.

Through Google Webmaster Tools you can submit your XML Sitemap, and once your site is verified, you can get a lot of extra information about your website, including:

• Any errors your site has
• Last time your site was searched by Google
• A content analysis that will give you information about your titles and descriptions
• Your top search queries
• Crawl Stats
• Both external and internal link data
• Plus a lot more

You can easily generate an XML Sitemap through many sources, I prefer XML-Sitmaps.com. Simply enter your URL and the site does the rest. It will spit out your perfect XML Sitemap that you’ll then submit to Google.

Follow all the steps in Webmaster Tools and you’ll be well on your way to making sure your entire website is as Google friendly as possible.

Earlier this week, Jefferson Graham from USA Today sat down with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, to discuss search engine optimization. Matt gave some basic tips that can help any webmaster achieve better rankings on Google. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Use the keywords and phrases that people would search for your site in your content.
2. Create good title and description tags.
3. Get other sites to link to you.
4. Create a blog and post often.
5. Use free tools like Google’s Webmaster Central Tools and Google Local.

In the article Matt goes into detail about each tip and how webmasters can utilize these suggestions to begin to optimize their own web pages. Matt also goes on to dispel other myths that people associate with search engine optimization such as paying for advertising to get better rankings.

There is also a video of the interview if you just don’t have time to read the post. Either way, it’s great information for anyone interested in search engine optimization.

It’s often been said that the title of your webpage is the most important tag on the page. The title tag is what shows up in the search results and basically either convinces a user to click on your link or keep reading to find another website.

You can quickly search for all of your title tags by using a site operator. Simply go to Google and type “site:www.yourdomainname.com” without the quotes. You will see every page that Google has indexed for your website. Read through all of your title tags and make sure they are written well enough to capture your attention.

Title Tag Rules:

As with any other aspect of search engines or writing code, there are certain parameters that you’ll want to follow to achieve the best results. Here are a few rules that you’ll want to abide by when crafting your title tags.

1. Title tag must be less than 70 characters including spaces. If you go over the character limit Google will cut off your title tag and place a “…” at the end of your title. Because a user will never see what you wrote after 70 characters, it is best to work within the character limit to create short, focused, and compelling titles.
2. Place keywords as close to the beginning as possible. Keywords are bolded in the title tag when you search for particular terms on search engines, drawing the user’s attention to your listing. The more words and characters you have in front of your keywords, the more diluted the value becomes.
3. Create unique title tags for each page. While performing the site operator above…if you run across duplicate title tags then there is a good chance that Google will consider those pages identical. Nine times out of 10 your pages aren’t identical, but in the eyes of Google they are. Google doesn’t like duplicate content and they will filter out pages that are seen as duplicates. To avoid this, be sure to create a unique title tag for each page of your site that helps both Google and users understand the page’s topic.

Follow these simple steps when you’re writing your next title tag and you should begin to see better search engine rankings as well as more traffic to your website.