Top 5 SEO Tips to Gain a Competitive Advantage
The invention of the computer, partnered with the internet, has had a profound impact on the way businesses operate and people communicate. Gone are the days of "snail mail" now that the internet has given birth to a global marketplace.
Online, June 10, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Whether you are the owner of a small business that caters to a niche market or a Marketing Executive for Johnson & Johnson, knowing the basics of how to position your company online will give you a leg up in your market.
Consumer buying trends have shifted, which in turn, has forced a gap between traditional marketing communications and how your customers actually shop. In today's marketplace, the Web is the primary source of product research by consumers-- this is the number one reason why internet marketing and search engine optimization is important in any business marketing strategy.
Now, let's jump right into the Top 5 things you can do to stay competitive online:
1. Keyword Strategy
First, you need to have a clear understanding of what your product is and what you're selling. Next, brainstorm for possible keyword phrases that are relevant to your business and products. Natural language always works well when list building for major keywords. Another way to building technique is to identify your competitors' keywords and add them to your list. At this stage, all keywords are innocent until proven guilty. Remember, there's a difference between 'high traffic' keywords and 'high conversion' keywords. Although high traffic is nice, the latter is always best.
2. Competitive Positioning
Knowing and understanding how to make your competitors' strengths and weaknesses work for you will be the determining factor in gaining a competitive advantage online. Some questions you want to answer are:
a. What is their advertising strategy?
b. How is their business model similar to yours?
c. How do they differentiate themselves in the market?
d. Are they more successful than you?
The rule of thumb is to match your competitors, then turn up the nitro. The page analyzer is a great tool to gauge where you are with respect to your competition.
3. Create an SEO Friendly Website
Ok... You're not a programmer; however, just knowing what is needed to build a SEO friendly website gives you a competitive advantage. Pre-planning and organizing your site is first and foremost, next, writing rich text content (See #4). You have to choose what keywords will go where, focus the page content and give the spiders what they are looking for--- using a rank monitor can help you with this. Another important aspect of constructing a SEO friendly site it to match your meta tags, header tags, and keywords to the page content. Use keywords to name all images, files, videos, and podcasts to take advantage of vertical search engine results. Finally, stay away from using too much flash.
4. Content is King, Queen, and Everything in Between
Content is more than just words, it also includes photos, videos and audio. Developing engaging content can be the most tedious part of an SEO campaign, but in all honesty, you get back what you put in. You want to build enough content to rank well but not overwhelm your viewers. A good mix of text, pictures, video, and audio should do the trick. The most important non important with respect to content development for SEO is not forgetting to add a call to action for each page. What's the point of all the work if you forget to ask for their business?
5. Linking, Linking, Linking
Building links are the nuts and bolts of driving traffic to your website. The purpose is to get external sites to link to yours and there are several ways you can achieve this:
a. Link Magnets- Elements on your site that people want to link to. This only happens when someone decides that the content on your site is useful and they provide a link from their site to yours.
b. Link Bait- Anything that is deliberately provocative in order to get someone to link to you. This type of linking is generally broad in scope and is not necessarily targeted to your ideal customer.
c. Link Requests- Emailing and contacting someone to ask for a link to your site. Usually, these are non-competing, related sites that cater to the same target market as you.
d. Link Buying- Paying for links on someone's advertising site. You should only buy links for advertising and traffic purposes, not for link popularity. Buying links for popularity won't go over too well with the major search engines.
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