Top 5 Factors of a Sucessful SEO Campaign
The sheer size and scope of the internet today means that optimizing your site for search engines such as Google and Yahoo is more important than ever before. Search engines catalog millions of pages, with thousands more indexed every day. According to a Forrester Research survey in 2006, 99% of search engine users stopped looking at results after the third page, making it important to get your content placed as high in the rankings as possible.
Five primary factors influence how well your SEO campaign will perform:
1. Updated Content
Fresh, constantly updated content is attractive to all search engines. Changing out news, events, and other items frequently alerts the search engines that you have an active, relevant site. Blogs are a great “automated” method of generating this dynamic content.
2. Keyword Selection and Placement
The buzz around keywords has been ongoing for years, and for good reason; keywords and keyphrases are one of the first things a search engine looks for when it attempts to index a page. Not only is the selection of keywords important (taking your geographic location and products/services into consideration when choosing them), the location of these keywords are vital as well. Search engines generally give higher rankings to pages that use their keywords throughout the site, and especially when they are used on the home page.
3. Inbound Linking
One of the more complex aspects of a SEO campaign is getting inbound links established to your website. An inbound link is a hyperlink to your page from an outside website, bringing traffic directly into your site. Local and national resource directories, event calendars and similar sites are good starting points. Search engines not only take the quantity of inbound links into consideration when ranking your site, they also focus on the quality; links from well-known, reputable sites are considered higher-quality (and therefore greater helping your ranking) than lower-ranking or irrelevant websites.
4. Title is Key
The title of your website (the line of text that appears at the top center of the browser window) is one of the most heavily-weighed factors when engines catalog your site. Since titles shouldn’t be extremely long, it’s important to squeeze in your most relevant and specific keyphrases, and leave out the ones that aren’t quite as indicative of your products and services.
5. Site Mapping
Site maps are a simple, powerful way of helping a search engine along when spidering your website. Sitemaps can be nothing more than a bulleted list of your page structure, showing the relationships and links between them, and are searched for by engines when they visit your site. When you put up a sitemap, the search engine is given a clear picture of how your site is organized, and also gives your users an accurate menu of your pages as well.