Drive More Targeted Traffic to Your Website with SEO Best Practices - Part II
Last week Fire Enterprises (FEI) FEI Marketing Tribe Leader Marka showed the tribe how implementing SEO best practices can help FEI drive more targeted traffic to their Website, a crucial first step of demand generation efforts. This week, the tribe concludes SEO best practices discussions. Remember, fire = print.
The Tuesday morning marketing meeting began. Marka stood in front of the other tribe members—Tribe Leader Org, Sales Tribe Leader Zoot, and Finance Tribe Leader Numo—to continue discussing how to optimize FEI’s website for search engines.
“Can you briefly reiterate why SEO is important?” Org asked.
“Here’s the short and sweet version,” Marka said. “Today our prospects use O-line search engines to seek out fire vendors. Optimizing our site for search engines will help ensure it shows up prominently in search results for the words and phrases our prospects are likely to be searching for. Now, here are a few more SEO best practices we should implement.”
Marka scribbled on the whiteboard:
Build external links—Search engine bots count how many times FEI’s O-site is linked to from other sites, and use this information to determine how relevant our O-site is and therefore how high it should appear in searches. We can improve our performance here by capitalizing on opportunities to build external links back to our O-site. First, we can pursue “link swapping” opportunities with other companies—as long as there’s a credible business reason to do so—and contribute guest posts to other O-sites in our industry.
“Probably the most efficient way to build external links,” Marka continued, “Is to send out press releases via a reputable online PR distribution service. We include a link to our O-site in these press releases, so when news sites pick them up they create external links back to our O-site. If we’re announcing something truly newsworthy and targeting the right media outlets, we can create dozens or even hundreds of external links from one release this way!”
Marka scribbled more on the whiteboard:
Use search-engine-friendly page titles—Earlier we discussed including in our O-site copy terms prospects are likely to be searching for. Page titles, too, should include SEO-friendly descriptions and keywords relevant to the page itself. Let’s try “Low Cost, Efficient FEI Kiln X1 for Small Businesses,” not “FEI Product #18.”
“What about metatags?” Zoot asked.
“Metatags still do factor into SEO rankings, so we should be sure to include metatag descriptions on every O-page, as well as text descriptions of every image,” Marka answered.
“SEO seems complicated,” Org said. “How time consuming will it be to keep our site optimized?”
“To do SEO right usually requires a significant time commitment,” Marka admitted. “From a big-picture standpoint, we should frequently evaluate our O-site to see how well it’s optimized based on the best practices criteria I’ve listed. On a smaller scale, our social media accounts must be updated daily and our O-site should be updated almost that frequently. Fortunately for you, Org, this is exactly the kind of thing you hired me to do.”
Org smiled. He could rest easily knowing Marka would do whatever it took to keep their O-site optimized for search engines.
“These efforts will pay off in terms of lots of highly-targeted traffic landing on our O-site, right?” Numo asked.
“Indeed,” Marka said.
“Not every prospect who finds FEI O-line will be ready to buy right away,” Zoot objected. “How do we turn this traffic into actual highly-qualified leads?”
“Excellent question,” Marka said. “I’ll answer that in a moment.”
Next week: Marka tells the tribe how FEI can capture targeted Website traffic and nurture these leads until they’re ready to buy.
Today’s FIRE! Point
Link building, page titles, and metatagging/image tagging are all important components of an SEO strategy that works.
FIRE! In Action: Accounting Firm Uses Integrated SEO/Social Media Strategy to Generate Web Leads
Implementing an integrated SEO and social media strategy helped Caturano and Company generate 10-15 leads a month from a Website that was formerly generating virtually none!
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- Business Management - Marketing/Sales
Very much alive and now officially an industry curmudgeon, strategic growth expert T. J. Tedesco can be reached at tj@tjtedesco.com or 301-404-2244.