5 SEO Tips in 2013 for Those Just Learning

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Of the many services Vertz Marketing provides for our clients, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to be one of the hottest and most important services talked about, especially in the Milwaukee area. SEO has been around a long time but the tactics that companies need to deploy to rank highest on Google and Bing/Yahoo! change quickly on an ongoing basis. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with SEO or smooth-talked by someone claiming to know all the magic to rank your website first. Your best defense is to educate yourself. Whether you’re a business owner, CEO, VP, or director at your company – if you have a basic knowledge of the most important areas for SEO, you’ll be able to understand and talk intelligently at a high level on some of the most important areas to focus your SEO efforts.

If you do NOTHING else, here are the top 5 things you should do to your website to help it rank higher on Google and Bing/Yahoo!.

Title Tag. This is the information at the very top of the web browser, typically above where you enter the url of a website. This is one of the most important pieces of information that the search engines look at and what is displayed in the search engine when a result is returned. Research the top performing keywords that someone would likely search to find what you’re selling and use this in your title tag. Be brief. Your title tag should be no more than 70 characters long (including spaces).

Description Tag. When you perform a search, the results returned will display both the ‘Title Tag’ as the title and the ‘Description Tag’ as the description in the search engine. Your description tag is part of the html code of the main page of your website. The content here should be between 150 and 170 characters long (including spaces) and should be appealing to the searcher while being keyword intensive at the same time. For example, if you sell in a specific geography like Milwaukee – then use the word Milwaukee along with the most popular keywords that are relevant to your market. For even better SEO, have unique description tags for each individual page of your website.

NO Keyword Tag. Years ago, the search engines looked at something called a ‘Keyword Tag’. These are lists of phrases that the webmaster would put in for the terms companies wanted to rank well in. Google no longer looks at this and Bing/Yahoo! will look at this only if they suspect your site is a spam or untrustworthy site. The best advice is to not put in a keyword tag. It won’t help you and now days it can only hurt your SEO.

Content is King. Having great, quality content on your site is one of the key ways to help your long-term SEO. Figure out the top keyword phrases your prospective customers are likely to search on and make sure to ‘sprinkle’ this content in throughout your website. Learn what an ‘alt’ tag is. The search engines can’t comprehend a picture unless you specifically tell the search engines what the picture is. Alt tags are a great way to help your SEO here. Make sure your pages all have unique content, don’t plagiarize, and the more pages of great content you can have the better.

Focus on One-Way Backlinks. What we mean by backlinks are websites that have a link to your website. Figure out the top 5 keyword phrases you want to rank well on and get other websites to make a link to you. These need to be relevant though! For example, if there’s a trade journal in your industry, will they put a link to your website on their site? If so, ask them to make the hyperlinked text match one of the hot keyword phrases you want to rank well in. It’s important to try to get solid one-way backlinks. If the site that is linking to you will only put up the link if you link to them as well – you’re wasting your resources as this won’t significantly help your long-term SEO.

If you haven’t really focused on SEO, these are 5 important Milwaukee SEO tips to help you get started. It is estimated that Google has well over 250 areas that make up their always changing search algorithm. The items that influence their algorithm are not equal with some items being extremely important while others have a very small effect. To learn more about Vertz Marketing’s SEO services and how we can help your business, please email us at SEOHelp@VertzMarketing.com or give us a call.