SEO Goes Social: Part 2 – Tips To Optimize Your Site

Now that we’ve seen how a well thought-out social media strategy can benefit your company’s search engine rankings – see SEO gets Social. Are You Ready? – it’s time to dig a little deeper into optimizing your website to maximize its impact and reach.

As part of our ongoing series on search engine optimization (SEO), we’ll explore easy and realistic tips to tweak your website to maximize visibility and drive traffic. The bonus for businesses of any size and in any sector is they can typically be implemented without requiring significant changes to your existing content or strategy.

We’ll expand on this series by devoting future entries to boosting the SEO capability of related social media resources like Facebook pages and Google+ profiles. For now, here are some quick tips that will help you enhance the SEO of your website:

· Talk to your customers. If you know what they’re looking for, you’re in a much better position to ensure your SEO efforts ultimately bring them to your website. Use formal and informal outreach methods to zero in on what they’re looking for when they use a search engine, and what keywords they’re using in the process.

· Choose your keywords carefully. Select keywords that relate to your business, products and services, and ensure they are used consistently throughout the site. Don’t “stuff” your site with them, though, as simply dumping words into pages can make some content unreadable and can also get you flagged as a spammer with search engines. Maintain a healthy balance between what your visitors want to see and what works well for search engines. Tools like Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery can help identify relevant keywords. Try scanning Twitter’s trending lists, as well.

· Weave web content into social. Ensure new content on your website is referenced and amplified via social media platforms. If you’ve posted a new blog entry, tweet about it and include the accompanying link. Also, be sure to post it to Facebook, LinkedIn and any others that your organization currently uses.

· Cross reference between your website and social properties.  Ensure you’re regularly cross-linking between your corporate website and related social properties like Facebook and Twitter. Use your social media streams to drive traffic to the site, and leverage the site to highlight and expand upon social activity.

· Make it easy to share. Ensure every entry has a clickable range of options that facilitate sharing via the most common social media platforms. These include, but are not limited to, Like or Share on Facebook, Tweet or Retweet on Twitter, +1 on Google+, Repin on Pinterest, etc.

· Be conversational. Sharing links via social media channels is only the beginning. Leverage your online relationships to generate conversation around new content. Allocate trained resources to monitor social traffic and respond to and participate in online discussions. Putting a human face on things goes a long way towards boosting SEO performance.

· Track your performance. Use an analytics service like Google Analytics to measure site performance and the impact of day-to-day changes on traffic.

If your company is currently facing SEO-related challenges, you may want to consider contacting Bell. Bell offers many website services for businesses that can help you not only establish a professional-looking presence online, but do so in a way that ensures the right customers will find your website.

In upcoming entries in this series, we’ll explore common SEO mistakes and provide tips on how to avoid them. We’ll also look closely at how to more thoroughly leverage social media profiles and resources – such as Facebook pages, Google+ presences and Twitter streams – to further raise your overall SEO performance.

Do you have any additional tips to share? Let us know in our comments area below.