Search Engine Optimization: Is your website easy to find?

By Jason Lamping
lampingj@alliancetechnologies.net

At Alliance Technologies, one of our key marketing strategies is to be highly visible on the web, especially with major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Making it easy for people to find you when they have a need leads to more qualified sales opportunities than traditional “interruption” style marketing, which plots tactics to try to find the buyer (e.g., cold calling, direct mail, advertising).

Optimizing your website for search engine visibility starts with a good keyword strategy. Keywords are words or short phrases that people type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. There are a few tools that Google offers to help you identify keyword search volume. By setting up a free Google account you can get access to these applications and begin identifying the most popular keywords related to your industry, product or service ( please email me if you need help with this: lampingj@alliancetechnologies.net). When thinking about keywords it’s important to also research your competitors to see if they are optimizing successfully and try to identify strategies for you to outrank them.

When it comes to keywords, I recommend minimizing the amount of relevant words or phrases that you use to optimize. In some cases, depending on your industry or product/service, picking just a few words to try to “win” with is the best way to go. The more words or phrases you try to optimize with, the harder it is to be the leader in any one category. This is a challenge for us at Alliance Technologies since we offer so many different products and services.
 
To handle this, I supplement my SEO strategy with a “pay-per-click” strategy. When I started, I decided that some representation on page one of a search engine result is still better than none. Typically, I only resort to pay-per-click ads for those keywords that I know I can’t optimize on within the “organic” or free listing section. However, in some instances, I’ll layer on pay-per-clicks just to get more representation on page one of the search engine.
 
In the example below Alliance Technologies has three representations on the top half of the page alone for the key word search phrase: “IT support des moines.” Alliance Technologies is #1 in the pay-per-click listing section, #1 in the Business listing section and #1 in the organic search results section.
 

I’ve also set up websites dedicated to a single product in order to fully optimize for that product only.

One thing to remember is that Search Engine Optimization is an on-going, never- ending process. Search engines are re-crawling and re-indexing website content frequently. It’s important to continue to push out new, fresh, relevant content that contains your keywords. Good ways to do this are through blogs, news/event announcements, social media, and newsletters. Every time you add content to your website you should be thinking about how to incorporate your keywords into the content.

If you would like to talk more about Search Engine Optimization and strategies for your business, please contact me at 245-7682 or lampingj@alliancetechnologies.net.