Three Practical Ways Your Business Can Leverage SEO
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Three Practical Ways Your Business Can Leverage SEO

October 15, 2007 // Franchising.com // Baltimore, Md. – Businesses today are quite familiar with the power of the Web in helping them find, get and keep customers online. Your company likely has an attractive website that provides solid, well-organized information and useful tools to its visitors. However, getting the right people to the website is a puzzle you're still trying to solve.

That's where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, comes in. SEO refers to the process of structuring and creating content to help your website appear as highly as possible in all relevant "natural" keyword search results. When done well and with a little patience, SEO can be the holy grail of Internet marketing as it can drive a high amount of targeted traffic to your website without the need to spend a dime on paid search listings.

While SEO is often seen as a black science to the technologically challenged among us, there are some effective steps your business can take to leverage keywords and optimize your site for search engines. Here are three practical ways your company can create an effective SEO strategy:

Be Everything for a Few, Not a Few for Everything
It's a common misconception that SEO simply involves throwing keywords against the digital wall to see what sticks. In reality, this tactic could hamper your site's SEO effectiveness or, even worse, get it flagged by the major search engines as a purveyor of keyword spam, which will make your website virtually invisible to search engines. Ugh, you definitely don't want that to happen.

Rather than stuff your website full of loosely-related keywords in an attempt to grab as many eyeballs as possible, pay close attention to the keywords and search terms that truly reflect your site's content. Consider the terms that describe what your company does, your industry, areas of specialization, geographic location, range of services and clientele (if applicable).

SEO Top Three: Focus, Density, Prominence
Before you dive into creating new website content, take a moment to consider what search engines look for as they crawl through a website. We've found that there are three factors – Keyword Focus, Density and Prominence – that the major search engines use to determine if the content of a web page is deemed relevant to a particular search query. Let's take a closer look at the significance of each:

Focus refers to the overall topics and themes of your website content. Every page should include content and keywords that are focused on a few targeted topics that are relevant to your audience. Pages that have no clear focus will be ignored by search engines.

Density is a formula for optimizing how frequently your keywords appear in your copy relative to the length of the page's content. Although there are no magic numbers to aim for, content for each targeted page should be no less than 300-400 words with a keyword density around 4-5%. If it gets much denser, the search engines will know you're trying to trick them by padding your web page with keywords.

The prominence of your keywords is another clear indication to search engines that these terms best reflect the content of your site. Keywords that appear in headlines, subheads and at the beginning of paragraphs indicate that the rest of the page content is relevant to these terms.

Structure Web Page Content for Easy Search
In addition to the SEO Top Three, the structure of your web page content factors heavily into how relevant and important it appears to search engines. As you set out to write copy for each page, pay close attention to the placement and format of your keywords:

•Include your designated keywords in every paragraph of the page's content, and repeat them as often as seems reasonable (don't forget about Keyword Density!).
•Use both singular and plural forms of your keywords to increase their visibility to search queries.
•Whenever possible, begin each paragraph with a subhead that includes a keyword.
•Use your keywords as links to other pages of your site.

Although SEO content strategies yield longer web pages with a lot of words, this structure will make them easier to read. That's important if you want new visitors to actually stick around and read something once they've clicked to your website!

Bonus Tip: Be Patient!
One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it will work as soon as you publish your newly-optimized pages. In reality, it can take months before SEO helps your website "move the needle" and start generating an increase in targeted traffic. Once you've implemented the above suggestions to optimize your content, be patient and give search engines some time to crawl through your site, index the pages and make them as visible as possible to relevant search queries.


About TruePresence
TruePresence is a national Internet marketing firm dedicated to helping businesses of all types and sizes find, get, and keep customers online. The company's unique franchise approach lets clients work strategically with a local consultant, while a national team of web design, development, and online marketing experts manages the fulfillment of each client solution. Headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, TruePresence currently has 22 franchise offices operating across the country and is actively expanding to new markets. For more information, visit www.truepresence.com.

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