Search engine optimization is hot among businesses within all sectors. No matter what industry you may be in, increasing your natural rankings within Google should be somewhat of a focus for your internal marketing manager. At Trinity, our job is to ensure the quality of our client’s search programs, primarily on the natural side of the house. The only way to keep your rankings however is to follow the algorithm and ultimately understand the factors that are paramount in SEO trends.
This year has been an interesting one to say the least with Google. The BIG change was dropped in May, when many sites were given a “N/A” for pagerank. Much different than the “google sandbox” (ie where your site sometimes sits when it is new to the index), the sites that were discounted included sites that allowed “manufactured” links within their webpages. Also discounted to a higher degree was that of reciprocal linking. Often a staple of online marketing and link building, the value that the reciprocal linking practice provides haste been reduced greatly from the past.
So where does a SEO go to get results? Glad you asked…Here are what we see is teh emerging trends today in SEO – but by tommorow, they may have changed so research is key.
1. Daily content
It seems like a no-brainer but you would be shocked to know how many sites sit without being updated for months. At Trinity, we have seen first hand how powerful this is. In our SEO engagements, a large portion of our work is centered around content development. We syndicate the content on the web, bookmark it in social sites, and then re-formulate the content (so its unique!) for publishing purposes on our client sites. No matter what you sell or offer on your site – write about it daily! Include RSS feeds to help with content integration from the blogosphere. Create a blog and use the “tag and ping” tactic to inform technorati and other news sites of your content. Following these processes is a must for high rankings.
2. Widget development
Ok, you may have to outsource the development of this one, but by creating a widget and marketing it online, you can literally have thousands of links coming to your site. Think through what type of widget may make sense for your business from a marketing perspective. Get creative! Is it a functional tool? Daily content updated via xml? Joke of the day? It really doesent matter. All that matters is that it is unique, catchy, and marketable – both on your website and via viral marketing on the web.
3. Back to basics – Keyword selection and HTML
Lets not forget SEO 101. Make every page unique. Make every page’s meta data unique. Target terms that have less competition but a high volume. Use phrases within your title tags segmented by “|”. Looking for a great tool to help you in identifying the best terms to target? Download the SEO for firefox tool and see what wonders it does for your keyword research. Get it at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
There’s so much more, but this is enough to hopefully get you down the right path with SEO. Drop me a line if you would like to learn more or just talk shop.
