If you’re not actively engaging in the right kinds of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices, your website just can’t do its job. In the early days of online marketing, websites were simply online versions of paper marketing materials. Today’s websites can do much more, and one way they do that is through proper SEO activities. In short, a simple website is like advertising in the phone book: you’re visible only to a narrow market and have no way to get to the top of the list except by choosing a company name beginning with “A.” An SEO-driven site is essentially listing your business on Google, giving you opportunities to stand out to a diverse, broad market.

What IS SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, typically shortened to SEO, is the strategy of integrating specific keywords and key phrases into website content in order to boost rankings in search engines. Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines have various software tools that “read” the Internet, cataloging sites and ranking them by relevance for specific searches. So, for example, if a consumer is searching for an outsourced marketing company in Rhode Island, and she types “outsourced marketing company Rhode Island,” into a Google search box, she will immediately find TribalVision because our site has been written with SEO in mind.

So, where to start?
SEO. SEM. Keywords. Key phrases. Meta tags. Density. Backlinks. Crawlers. Redirects. It’s a lot to learn, and it’s not necessarily something a busy small business owner has time to focus on. The good news is that much of the SEO work can (and should) be handled by your marketing team, content provider(s), and web developer(s). Content providers can integrate keywords when writing static site text and can continually integrate more and/or new keywords while blogging. Hash-tagging blogs (see the subject tags below each TribalVision blog post!) is a great way to get those keywords in while keeping the search engines’ attention.

Additionally, there are many useful methods available to help you and your team determine which keywords and key phrases are most relevant to your business. One of the simplest and easiest tools to use is the browser “toolbar” from SEOBook.com, a company known for their outstanding, free, web-based SEO tools. Our top pick for a successful SEO campaign: HubSpot. We use HubSpot for many of our clients because this useful suite of marketing tools allows us, among other things, to analyze site data and make changes to SEO campaigns based on those results.

For more information about the ways a strong SEO campaign can generate quality leads on your website, drop us a line through the “Connect” page above!