The 3 Most Important Things in SEO and SEM

Page optimization is still important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but it no longer has the power it once did. Proper optimization will always help in content organization, but it will not help with rankings. SEO has changed from optimizing for robots and improving rankings to creating reader-friendly content. Below are the three most important things to consider in SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Content:

Original content always wins when it comes to SEM. Good content does not only mean the use of proper grammar and good writing skills, but also the information it contains. Web content may include on page content, blogs, and social posts. Search engine marketing is all about facilitating your readers with good content. Here are some helpful guidelines to writing better content:

• Informative content: make sure your content is informative and beneficial to your readers.
• Good grammar, spelling, and other basic writing skills are important to focus on.
• Explanatory content: In every industry, there are some technical terminologies regular people might have hard time understanding. Create content around different jargons to help your customers understand your industry better.
• Tips and how to’s: Create content that people will benefit from. Give tips on how to use some of your products or services.
• Relative content: Content in your website should always be relative to your industry. Always have a good balance between fun and business related blogs. Writing a blog post about some community activity you participated will show a soft side of your company while posts about services your company provide can help your site become more creditable and show how knowledgeable you are in your industry.

Link Building:

For some time, link building has been associated mainly with buying links from random websites. It used to be the easiest way out for most SEO companies, but it does not work that way anymore. There is a rumor that link building is dead. Well, is it? Link building is becoming one of the major strategies in SEM. One of the latest approaches is getting links by actually asking for them. A tricky part is finding ways to link to relevant websites.

How to link build:

• Offer free services: People are more likely to link to your site if you give them what they need.
• Create great content that will be useful and worth sharing
• Volunteer or sponsor events in your area.
• Talk to people: Share information, research, and new ideas in your industry.
• Be creative: create cool videos, animations, info graphics, etc.
• Pay attention to natural link building and join directories.(Keep relevancy in mind)

Social Media:

Social media is more than just having thousands of followers. For some time, the number of followers or likes a business page had was enough, but this is no longer the case. It is wise to first research your audience and know where they hang out before creating any social account. It is a waste of time creating a Pinterest account when most of your possible customers use Facebook. The challenge is not just adding the number of followers, but getting followers who actually care about your industry.

What can help you with your social campaigns?

• Know your audience and where they spend time.
• Never abandon your social accounts and always stay active
• Timing is the key to getting more traffic
• Provide your clients with the information they need
• Join communities
• Participate in conversations (keep in mind relevancy)
• Reach out to people who are interested in your industry
• Give tips on how to use your products and/or services
• Be creative and have fun with it.(good content, photos, graphics, videos, etc.)

Here is an example of creative Valentine’s Day social post from Starbucks:

If you are not doing this, then you are doing it wrong:

Before applying new strategies, make sure you revisit your content, re-optimize your website, and clean up all the bad back links (spammy links). After getting quality content, using social media strategies and starting on link building, it is important to monitor all your new tactics. There are several websites that can display website changes on the rankings, monitor keywords, page views, and more. Some of those websites include SEO Moz, Google analytics and Google web master tools.

By: Naima