Although there is a great deal of content out there, many companies have been neglecting their need for the basics. Explanatory sentences, introductory paragraphs and additional content pages have been lacking. On many sites, the absence of content makes it harder for clients to connect to the company, because they need to go to sites like Wikipedia for additional information. A bulleted list of services and solo headlines are not going to cut it anymore.

For example, assume I want to get my teeth whitened, and visited the website of a dentist who specialized in a new and quicker laser technology. All that is listed on his website is the name of the laser. I want to know how long it takes, whether there is tooth sensitivity, how long it lasts and how much it costs. I don’t want to have to sift through the haystack to find out basic information this website should have. It is all about being customer-driven.

As an online culture seeded in ‘knowing,’ we appreciate a journalistic approach to web content. We want to know the who, what, where, why, how; and we would like it in a succinct grouping of words that are clear and understandable. We want organized, short paragraphs with proper spacing. We like reading blogs if they are well-written, and give us interesting take-aways.

What your company writes online could make a huge difference in the overall traffic to your website.  Journalists may have been written off by the perpetually declining newspaper industry, but can be particularly useful in the vast sea of ‘wannabe’ bloggers.

The ‘Chinese Wall‘ separating the desire to inform and the desire to persuade is crumbling more rapidly online than in print. This puts every company in the position to take hold of it and develop content, or let the opportunity slip through their fingers. This form of strategic advertising encompasses more than just viral e-mails and targeted placement. We are entering an age of advertorials, stealth user reviews, SEO copywriting and better online content.

This logical progression makes it even more important for your company to have more than just half-ass, thrown together blog posts, press releases and content pages. Your written content is part of your image, and even more online, part of your reputation. Spelling errors and ill-worded run on sentences will be judged along with the services you offer. We as users look for competency, and your content will tell us a great deal.

Blind Acre has seen the benefit of being able to provide our clients with quality content. If you are not a writer at heart, you can always hire us…or one of the thousands of laid-off journalists serving tables right now. Don’t neglect your website.

Most social media sites link back to a particular web site, and even though a lot of sites have adapted no follow links (meaning you will not benefit from inbound links), they are increasing your visibility in the search engine results page.

So what does this mean?

Social media can and does influence search engine optimization. However, the goals for a brand may determine what strategy works best for them.

If your brand is already well established, you may want to leverage social media to help you optimize for other keywords and phrases. For example, if Coca-Cola decided they wanted to enter the dessert game and offer a new drink, simply putting this new drink on their website may not be enough. As part of their marketing campaign they may leverage a blog to discuss the finer points of the new drink or even YouTube videos about how to make and enjoy the beverage. These social media tools in conjunction with a larger marketing campaign will help Coca-Cola rank for dessert ideas and new coke drinks.

On the other hand, a less well-known and established brand may take a different approach to utilizing social media for SEO. This may include a startup company looking to push their brand awareness. They may focus all of their social media and community building on branded items that help push their name to the top of the search engine results page and help fill out all of the results when someone searches for them.

Focusing strong efforts in some channels is definitely better than spreading your channels. I believe everyone should get a blog because that is the social media channel that anyone can most easily utilize to help influence search engine ranking.

Beyond a blog, if Facebook doesn’t make sense for a company, wait to use it. But if Yelp or Twitter does, make sure to not only leverage that but to build those communities into strong locations for the brand.
Finally, it is important to understand Social Media and how this practice effects SEO. It is not enough just to have a website if you do not attract visitors to it.

SEM (search engine marketing) is the effective use of on-site SEO and other techniques to promote and increase the traffic of a web site. You can exploit SEM by using techniques such as: articles, back links, forum postings, press releases, and online ads. SEM is not a one-time task; you continually need to update the site with new information and make sure it stays optimized for the search engines.

On the other hand, SEO is the process by which you make your site optimal for rankings by using things like: content, titles, headings, and keywords. In addition, it refers to making your site desirable to the search engine. SEO is not a one-time task, but rather an ongoing process where you add, update or change content on your website in order for the search engines to crawl and index your information.

SEM and SEO are long-term processes that complement each other. Success entails merging your marketing on other sites with optimizing your business’s own site in order to get higher rankings in the search engines. No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

1. Time – Link building is a very time intensive process. It can sometimes take a few weeks or even months for an inbound link to be added to your site.

2. Patience – Because this is a very timely process, it is important to be patient and keep working on building links. The results from link building are not going to be seen overnight.  So, do not get discouraged, as results can sometimes take several months to be realized.

3. Research – Because Link Building and Search Engine Optimization is a field that is constantly evolving and changing, it is important that industry research is conducted often to stay current with new trends. It is also very important to keep a close eye on your clients’ competitors. Do your research to see what tactics they have been using to get top results in the search engines.

4. Searching – Finding quality links can take a lot of research.  Searching can be considered an art-form as you often have to get very creative when looking for the right places for your clients’ sites to be submitted to.

5. Submission – The submission process is a very important step in Link Building.  Submitting a site allows you to take advantage of select industry keywords for each client. The submission step can include the submission of press releases, and to classifieds, directory listings, forums, social networks, articles, blogs, social bookmarking and more.

In summary, Link Building literally is an art form of “building” links to a site. This is accomplished by a site’s link being added to directories, articles, forums, blogs, news stories, press releases and more.  This, in return, helps to:

•    Make your site more popular
•    Increase the relevancy of the site
•    Increase the page rank
•    Generate new business leads
•    Gain trust among your existing as well as prospective clients

#1: Name your pages strategically! The filename of your page tells the search engine a lot about what you are displaying to the user!  Break down pages into “specific” product and/or service pages rather than creating a single page that lists all products and services.  Be sure to name the page based on the keyphrases you are targeting for that page (the product or service offered).

#2:  Title your page strategically!! Use the keyphrase(s) you are targeting in your URL (see #1) in the title element in the <head> section.

#3:  Write good meta description tags! Search engines take into consideration the abstract you create to describe what the page is representing.  The abstract is placed in the <head> section as well inside of a <meta name=”description” content=”<<<your abstract>>>” />  Keep your descriptions specific to the keyphrases you are targeting for each page.

#4:  Create links with keyphrases as the anchor content! Anytime you are creating links within your site or to your site from other websites, be sure to include the keyphrase you are targeting for that page inside the link.  An example is: <a href=”www.yoursite.com/the-seo-friendly-page”>[keyphrase included link]</a>  Search engines are more likely to rank you higher for a particular keyphrase  if they see links with the keyphrase pointing to your seo friendly page for the service or product.

#5:  Write good, relevant, key phrase related content… content is king! Contrary to what you may think or believe, having too much content is rarely ever a bad thing in the SEO world.  Although, balancing design and text on a page becomes a more delicate issue.  We don’t want to confuse or lose visitors because the page feels too congested, but we want to give more than one paragraph describing the product or service.  Don’t take the easy way out with content; make sure you create strong, keyphrase-rich content talking about your products and/or services.  If you can find a way to add dynamic, changing content to each page, it will give the search engines a reason to return to your page(s) frequently, thus giving them a reason to believe your site is more useful/relevant site than those that never change!