SEO, SEO, SEO – Is that the Answer?

SEO, SEO, SEO… is repeating a key term within the copy of content a good way for getting ranked in the search engines? Over the years I have worked on and off on SEO efforts and it has always been a challenge. I have been to enough search conferences and read enough SEO articles to get the main points, but there is still a good degree of art added to the science that makes this a little more of an unknown than most direct marketing efforts.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is defined by Wikipedia as “…the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.” SEO sounds great right. Free traffic! That would be great, and is, when you can make it work, but often times you are paying an SEO consultant a lot of money for this “free traffic”.

If you are new to the SEO field you can find a slew of articles to help you get started and most will revolve around Google, which really is the most important search engine to optimize your site/content for. I do not have access to your web stats, but I will guess that over 70% of your search traffic is coming from Google. At the very least, Google should be where you start your SEO efforts. I would recommend reading up on SEO, whether you decide to go with a consultant or not. Being conversant in the SEO language will be very beneficial when working with a consultant.

I am not going to go into much detail here, but if you find a good article on SEO it will mention refreshing your content, making it relevant and keyword rich, using keyword rich links and link building with other sites. I have found that making the titles of my pages and articles keyword rich has boosted my SEO results as well.

When adding content to my blog, site or a newsletter I will always keep SEO in mind, but readability should be the number one goal of any content provider. If the content is not interesting, relevant and enjoyable to read then you may get some traffic, but they will not be coming back again. SEO is a great tool for driving traffic when successful, but just as important is engaging the visitors by providing them with information that will make them want to come back for more. Keep this in mind when you are working on SEO projects or you will not realize much of the return that can come from this traffic.

Good luck, and for those of you counting, I have now used the SEO acronym 21 times. Only time will tell if it helps in the rankings. I was somewhat overdoing it on this one since it was the topic of the post, but I hope you still find it readable and relevant. Let me know.