3 Essentials of SEO

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Increasing Business from an Internet site requires a strategy to accomplish the following three tasks.

1> Optimize the website for reader interest, retention, and conversion.

2> Optimize the website for search engines. Each has a different criteria.

3> Attract customers to the site by using traditional and 2.0 tactics.

Businesses trying to drive business quickly can engage in Pay per click advertising. The ROI can be enhanced by using analytics to test for key words and target markets. At the same time the site has to be enhanced to retain and convert the visitors to the desired action.

Organic growth is achieved by synchronizing the business, key words, and queries so that visitors get what is promised and what they expect when they arrive. Secondly, it is achieved by using Social Media practices to create followers from the community at large. This can be achieved through blogs, articles, videos, pod casts, press releases, referrals from other sites, and interaction with social media sites and forums.

A well coordinated effort produces maximum effectiveness and ROI over the long term and will yield noticeable short term improvements.

Social Media and Optimizing for Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization is important for businesses relying on their website to produce more business. What I find daily is that most websites were designed by great web site designers who often do not understand the true potential of optimization.

Consequently, many executives think of their website as a business card with extra powers, but are happy if they get minimum functionality. Let’s face it, the internet has become a major factor in only the last five to ten years. Most executives were already out of college and firmly placed in the corporate ladder climb.

What more companies now realize, is that their audience has new information seeking habits that cannot be ignored if you want to reach them and have credibility that you are in their world. The 2.0 world is about delivering information in the format or source that consumers believe is their world. They want to do their own investigations and rely on people they trust to give them the low down.

Face Book was started in 2004 by a couple of Harvard students that never intended it to be a business. It soon spread to hundreds of college campuses. Twitter may have started as a fun place to exchange meaningless diatribe, but commerce has found it hard to ignore the gathering of 23 million people a day. It is becoming a new Google of sorts. When you get into the deeper services you can see it is a wired city of commerce.

It’s just beginning. Advertisers go where the people are. The social sites including Flicker, Ebay, Craigslist and others have rerouted the commerce channels. Colleges have not taken Social Media seriously yet, but it is a great path for graduating seniors in this economic climate.

Books like “A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization” by Delina Hay point the way.