3 SEO Tips to Improve Your Inbound Marketing Results
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a handy name for the myriad techniques used to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website or web page. Attracting qualified leads from search engines is an important component of your inbound marketing strategy. At its core, SEO focuses on two critical processes:
- How search engines work.
- How people search the Internet.
While it may sound simple, search engine optimization is a highly complex, technical and ever-changing challenge. Search engines constantly change their search parameters and algorithms, necessitating constant SEO tweaking. A good example is the latest version of Google Search, codenamed "Caffieine", which changes the way website pages are indexed and ranked in search results.
Internet users search for different products and services in different ways. Pinpointing the precise queries that will effectively target a specific audience and produce reliable results is a challenging undertaking that requires a sound keyword strategy, constant SEO management and fine tuning.
Effective SEO implementation and management requires expert integration of website development experience with knowledge of Internet analytics. Try these approaches to your website SEO strategy to help qualified leads find your website:
- Deep linking. Deep linking creates links into and between as many web pages on your website as possible. When all of the links from outside your website end up on your home page, or if the majority of links to your site are generated automatically, search engines devalue your site. To be found on the first page of the search results for relevant search phrases, you must have a highly ranked, authoritative website. This means that the search engines find that other authoritative, popular sites have links to your pages. To be highly ranked, links from other websites, Facebook, your blog, etc. should be directed to as many different interior pages as possible. Links should also move site visitors from your home page to interior pages and between interior pages. The more complex and varied your linking, the more highly search engines will rank your website.
- Social bookmarking. A slew of popular social bookmarking widgets are available that make it easy for website visitors to bookmark your website for fast returns or sharing with friends. Search engines value these outbound links and the inbound links they may produce if someone bookmarks your website or blog. Make it easy for site visitors to connect by featuring social bookmarking links prominently on your website and other inbound marketing tools.
- Site map. Site maps allow you to link to and from every page on your website. Site maps provide an easy-to-use navigation tool for site visitors and search engines. Search engines crawl site maps just as they do web pages. Linking interior web pages to your site maps ensures that search engines will find and catalog every page on your site.
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