5 SEO Strategies for the Long Term

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. In order to achieve and keep high search engine rankings over the long haul, you need to stay committed by following a long-term SEO plan. It’s simply not enough to optimize your site once and then forget about it.

1. Constant Keyword Research - A lot of people commit the mistake of assuming SEO keyword research is a one-time task. This is a crucial error in judgment. There are always new key phrases you can try to target. It’s essential that you practice continuing research over the long haul. This will help you go after seasonal phrases, overlooked terms, and new keywords that pop up over time.

2. Update Content Regularly - Of course, you need somewhere to put the new keywords that you’re going to be targeting. That’s why it’s important to update your content regularly. In addition to incorporating new keywords, updating your content regularly builds trust with search engines and humans. Furthermore, since the search engines crave fresh content, it increases your chances of grabbing high search engine placement.

3. Get Links for that Content - Link building is one of the most important long term SEO strategies. You should always be coming up with ways to get more high quality inbound links to your website. Don’t just go after the sudden surge in backlinks; try to create content and tools that steadily generate links over time.

4. Review Website Periodically - Sometimes, certain pages on your website just don’t work for SEO. Whether it’s the keywords you’ve chosen to target, a lack of links, or poor content, some pages just won’t rank well. It’s your job to review your website periodically to determine which tweaks can be done to change that. If you have a page that’s consistently done poorly over time, it’s probably time to change it up a little bit.

5. Focus on Usability - At the end of the day, the best thing you can do for your website is to focus on usability. Because it won’t matter how great your search engine rankings are if humans can’t use your site easily. To me, SEO done properly improves website usability. It’s only when people go overboard with their SEO that it hampers the site’s usability. If you make your site with the user in mind, they’ll make sure that your site stays popular.

Read More..

How to Use the Footer to Improve SEO and Increase Traffic

The Footer is often overlooked by web designers and web developers alike. But it can be the hidden gem of any well thought website; delivering SEO optimization advantage and bringing additional traffic. Lately, it seems, the footer is showing a new trend in web design altogether. Let’s look at how we can combine beauty and brains in the innocent footer.

Read More..

7 Recession Strategies For B2B SEO

SEO remains one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, especially over the long haul. If your site and the pages on it have historically responded well to desired search terms, you should be tweaking your site to speak to the changing market. Here are seven inexpensive strategies to help you win during these challenging times.

Understand the changing landscape
Have the needs of your prospects and customers changed during the downturn? Are there products or a segment of you business more suited to these times than before? Do you need to change how you position some of your offerings? Are the keywords used by your prospects changing? What words are your prospects including now including in their searches that they didn’t include before? The primary words used in queries may be the same, but the long tail of those queries may be different.

Tweak existing content
Likely, there are many pages on your site that should be modified to speak to these tough economic times and the changing long tail. Adjust and expand the copy to ensure it resonates well with your prospects’ concerns, and also with search engines when those prospects search for solutions using long-tail terms that reflect those concerns. Read More..