5 Tips to Jumpstart Your SEO Campaign

As the year winds down and we look forward to a more fruitful 2009, we begin to ponder on lessons learned and opportunities to be had. It is of course no secret that purchasing behavior is shifting towards the online channel, some industries more-so than others. How will you stack up against your competition? How can you be sure that your customers can find you in Google, Yahoo, and MSN when they search for your products or services? Any person involved with the online sector will tell you that search engine optimization is the key and here are 5 tips to get your campaign galloping in the right direction.

1. Keyword Research. – This is the basis of your SEO because you’re not only determining a refined product/service/page title, you’re also determining what your customers are truly searching for. Don’t just use the product title as the page title for your items, use keywords that your clients may search for as the product title. It’s not what the product is, it is what the customer searches for. Be sure to include long-tail terms in your keyword lists as well.

2. Refine Your Title Tags. – This is why you came up with your pool of targeted keywords and terms. You implement highly-relevant search terms into the title tags of each page of your site. This alone can have a great positive impact on your rankings and traffic in the search engines. Remember that the more characters you put into your title tag, the less weight each character then carries.

3. Refine Your Meta Data. – This includes both the description and the keywords portion. Make sure your are hitting the target terms, no less, and maybe just a smidgen more.

4. Image Optimization. – Do each of the images on your site have an alt tag or title tagappended to them? If not, the New Year is the perfect time to implement the fields. Again make sure relevancy is key and it doesn’t matter what the product is called, the thing that matters is what the customers are searching for to find the product.

* Image tip – don’t forget to rename your images if you have to. Rather than naming your image ‘965874.jpg’, call it ‘bluewidget.jpg’ instead.

5. Internal Linking Structure. – Be sure that each page can be found by search engine spiders and the links are easily found. Depending on the intention of your site, the basic layout should follow some sort of formalized structure: Homepage -> categories – > sub-categories -> sub-sub-categories (if needed) -> product/service level page. Be sure that every page on your site has another page linking to it so you have a sound structure that can easily be found. Also use strong keywords in the anchor text of your links. Although internal links are not as influential as external links, they are still given a considerable amount of weight and authority.

Search engine optimization is becoming as important as ever in this day and age and with great resources out there such as Search Engine Land and SEO Moz, it’s easy and important to keep up with the times and not miss a beat with the search engines.

Tags: search engine optimization, seo