This post corresponds to podcast Episode 8: Search Engine Optimization with Christine O’Kelly of SEO Content Solutions which is included in our Core Program, accompanied by workbook and video tutorials that show you how to do this on your own.



In our previous post about Building Your Website on Wordpress we outlined a way for you to create an easy-to-manage, scalable site with plugins that will extend compatibility with Social Media, ecommerce, calendars and more.  Once that infrastructure is in place, you’ll need to make sure that people can actually find your site. For prospects to do so, your website must appear high in the search engine rankings.

Most people will try to find out about your company through the web. To confirm this for yourself, try this: the next time you are in a room full of people, ask how many of them used the internet to get information about their last purchase. Then ask how many found the information they needed through the yellow pages, newspaper/magazine advertising or some other method. Chances are great that these people used the web as their primary source of information.

Your customers and prospects do the same thing, so you want your company to be found easily online, and to appear high in search engine results. This means that you need to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here are a few important terms:

• A search engine is simply a site like Google or Yahoo, which allows you to type in a word or phrase and look for relevant matches.

• The word or phrase you are searching for is known as ‘keyword(s).’

• When you search for your keyword(s) you will receive a list of results. The list can be many pages long, depending on your search term(s).

• SEO is the process of getting your company’s information to appear higher on the list of results, so prospects will see your page before they see your competitor’s information.

Most people don’t search beyond the first page of results. This means that if your company is not easily found, you get left out of consideration altogether.

So how can I best optimize my website, to ‘get found?’

That’s the million-dollar question, and the answers are all pieces of the SEO puzzle. We get in-depth in the Free Marketing Made Easy course, but for easy reference here are some of the essential components of your SEO strategy:

1. Relevant content: know the terms that your prospects are searching for and build your website around them.
2. Inbound links: when other websites link to yours, they are creating indirect endorsements. Search engines like inbound links because they establish a certain degree of credibility for your site.
3. Social Media: Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts, etc…these are all searchable elements of the web. Altogether these components work to create a ‘long tail’ that extends your brand and makes your company easier to find.
4. For various reasons, SEO is an art as much of a science. The search engines don’t make their exact processes known (they have their own ‘secret recipes’); so one sure way to improve your ranking right away is to use Google’s Adwords. This does not mean that we are recommending you go right out and start a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. That may or may not be the right approach for your company. You might want an SEO consultant (such as SEO Content Solutions) to review your exact situation and advise you appropriately.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about SEO is that it starts now and never stops. You will be enhancing your SEO visibility on a continual basis, but your competitors will be working on theirs too. As with most of the online marketing elements we recommend, you can learn the basics and implement them yourself fairly easily and with little expense.  From there you’ll want to consider whether you want to maintain your SEO campaign yourself, or use a consultant to improve it regularly.

While you are doing that, you also need to know about SEO’s partner, Site Optimization and Conversion. After all, getting the right people to your site is one thing. Getting them to do what you hope they will do is another story altogether, and that’s the subject of our next post.