Seo Basics Part 3

Content is King — How content and cross links influence search engine ranking

When the people over at Google came onto the scene, they changed everything. They approached the problem of making sense of the vast information of the Internet from a library science methodology. Inventing search and indexing algorithms in the same way that the Smithsonian might catalog it’s materials.

This ain’t your mom’s dewy decimal system.

A very important method modern search engines use to decide your rank, is deciding how relevant you are to the library that they are indexing; i.e. the Internet. This is done in part by looking for cross references. Every time your name appears on another site, whether it’s a story you wrote for another site, a story someone wrote about
you, or just a simple hyperlink, these ‘cross references’ help to qualify you as a expert source of information. You can see how powerful a tool this is. Suppose you were searching for information about the ‘Jacobean Era,’ you’d probably expect to also find many references, such as; William Shakespeare, King James I, England & Scotland, and even styles of furniture and arts of the time. This is one of the reasons these search engines work so well at finding the information that you are looking for. This is why you must do everything you can to qualify yourself as an expert in your field.

How to qualify yourself as an expert:

Write helpful articles for publication on your site
Articles just like the one you are reading now, are terrific ways to not only help your audience but will also sky-rocket your search engine rankings.

Create a press section

Reporters work under tight deadlines and are always looking for a good story to write. Give them the tools they need to make writing about you easier. Make sure your press section includes a small library of hi-res images of your products or services, your logo artwork in vector and web res versions. Include sample stories if you can; sometimes it’s difficult to to get a story started. If you have a few different sample articles for press release they can use them verbatim, or use the story as reference for their own. When you can afford it, a PR firm can do as much good, if not more, than a marketing firm.

Ask your partners and third party sites to add a link to your site
Don’t be afraid to ask the partners, clients and third parties, i.e. those that complement your site, to add a story, or link to your site. Offer to return the favor on your own site or sites. Remember these cross references help them too!

Try and make speaking engagements

Believe it or not, there’s a good chance that you really are an expert in your field! Offer to speak at anything — schools, events and conferences. You’d be surprised how many times efforts like this filter down from a printed program, all the way to the web.

…and this is just to name a few.

Titles are just as important as anything on your site!

Writing great titles is not only critical to your SEO efforts, but also towards engaging your readers attention. I can’t tell you how many bounce rate numbers I have turned around for clients, simply by re-writing their titles. Take these examples: “Best Work-flow Tools” vs. “How to Save Your Firm $100,000.00 Annually”

You only have a split second to engage your audience. Make sure that your titles highlight why the copy they are about to read is helpful to them. Use images, diagrams and good layout techniques to reinforce the message throughout the story. The title is the first reason for reading on.

Many sites use images for titles. This allows you to design pages with fonts and typography not usually available to your average web browser. This looks great, but always make sure that you are using tags. These are ‘alternative text’ tags embedded in the HTML to make the image readable by search engines, browsers that don’t support images and for handicap features. These are very important, so always verify with your designer or programmer that every single title on your site has an ALT tag. Many times you can test this yourself by leaving your cursor over the graphic for a few seconds. A plain text version of the title should appear over the image. If this doesn’t happen don’t panic. It might be that you have this feature turned off in your browser preferences. Search engine spyders cannot read ‘pixels,’ so do be sure to ask your developer to confirm that they are in fact there.

So by now your are getting all kinds traffic to the site. Your next step should be to learn how to make heads or tails out of this traffic and how to use that information to further improve your rankings and web traffic, and more importantly your conversion rate! That is are you turning your sales leads into actual clients?

SEO Basics by Joseph Steck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.