Strategy

It’s a fact; People trust their web search results (left side of a search results page) more than sponsored link ads. You can greatly improve your search engine ranking with some simple techniques.

Assignments

Marketing Team/Agency:

For the most part, you will see the most dramatic results by doing one very simple, but time-consuming activity—writing web copy around your identified keywords (Play R-39) and your Key Message (Play T-02). By writing a separate web page for each of your keywords, with a paragraph or two on how your products and service relate to the keyword, you’ll be well on your way. Depending upon the breadth and depth of a particular keyword, you may need to devote even more content (and web pages) to it.

However, as is so often the case, it’s important how you implement the above strategy. Let’s start with the three most important factors:

1. Formatting your content to make your web site easy for search engines to index.
2. Site architecture: linking your site together so that PageRank flows to your most important pages.
3. Placing your keywords in the proper locations on your page for optimal ranking effect.

Some sites get one or two of these correct, but it’s rare to see the site which has mastered all three. And that’s good news for you, because if you fully understand the art of creating a search engine friendly site then you’ve got a huge advantage over your competition. Get all these factors right and you’ll most certainly gain a leg up on your competition.

Coaching Points

• Pick up a copy of my booklet, Google Optimized for $9.95. It’s a 20-page checklist that will give you a solid jumpstart within a 4-step process for getting your site on Google's radar.
• For search engines to find content to index, the text must be in a machine-readable format, so don’t let your Marketing Team convert web text to images so it’s more “beautiful.” You should be able to copy and paste content from your site into a text editor or an e-mail, otherwise, Google and Yahoo! won’t find you.
• Ditto for Flash-based sites. Use Flash and kiss SEO out the window.
• Make sure all your pages work. Translation: links to pages on your site link to pages that exist. Watch the spelling errors.
• Optimize one page for each keyword and give each page a unique title tag.
• For each of your dedicated web pages, include the keyword phrase in the Title, Meta keywords tag and Meta description tag. To be on the safe side, limit your verbosity to 65 characters (which amounts to 5-10 words) in the Title. In the Description meta tag, limit yourself to 160 characters (10-20 words). For your Keywords meta tag, you may use as many as 1000 characters, but experts suggest forgetting about them altogether. Therefore, leave them out.