50 Search Engine Marketing Techniques – Part 4

31. Use Press Releases for SEO

Optimising press releases for search engines dramatically increases visibility, increasing referrals to your site. SEO PR is incorporating keywords and phrases into releases and posting the content to news sites and wires such as www.sourcewire.com. Because the press release content is specific and relevant to the chosen keywords, Google, Bing and Yahoo will rank the release highly – much more effective than link exchanges and directory listings.

32. Hire an SEO Expert

The search engine marketing field is a crowded area and there are literally hundreds of ways of getting sites to the top of Google, which can seem a bit overwhelming to some. Hiring an outside expert obviously incurs a cost, but if you’re having a tough time getting your site to rank highly for your chosen keywords then you may want to consider hiring MB Web. We are one of the UK’s leading web marketing and SEO companies, and what we don’t know about search engine marketing isn’t worth knowing. To talk to us about our SEO packages, please get in touch.

33. Use Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Though not a real SEO technique, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns cannot be overlooked in the search engine marketing world. Essentially, PPC is a practical promotion technique to boost short-term traffic. The ads appear only when someone actually searches for a particular keyword phrase, and you only pay for the advertising when someone actually responds to it. You don’t pay a penny for all the people who may see the ad but not click through to your website.
However, managing PPC campaigns can be time consuming and extremely expensive if you do not have the in-house expertise to monitor your campaigns. In fact, if you are unable to devote the time (or a member of staff) to oversee the creation and monitoring of a PPC campaign, it can quickly consume large amounts of money for very little return. If you would like to speak to the a pay-per-click marketing expert, contact us today.

34. Use Broad Matching and Other Ad Targeting

Broad matching involves trusting a search engine’s algorithms to decide whether a search phrase entered by a user is sufficiently closely related to the phrases defined within your campaign to trigger your ad. If this matching is too conservative, you may miss out on relevant traffic. If it’s too liberal, your ads may be shown to people who are searching for something completely unrelated. Broad matching can be an effective way of generating lots of traffic from your campaign. However, if used without care it can also dilute click quality, damage click-though rates and become extremely expensive very quickly.

35. Position Content Correctly

Search engine spiders read a page in code, not in the way we see it. It is therefore important to make sure the main content of your page is easily accessible – in other words, as near to the top of the page (in code) as possible. The mistake many web designers make is that they have the left-hand navigation code first, and then the main content of the page. This means the main content is often halfway down the page. If the main content of the page is near the bottom, then you are effectively telling the search engine spider that it is of low importance.
To tweak the code and make it more search engine friendly, you can use CSS to swap the positioning of the navigation and main content. This means that the spiders will crawl the main content first, followed by the navigation, without affecting the overall aesthetic of the page.

36. Make a Great Landing Page

There are two areas that the site owner needs to concentrate on with landing pages. The first is content optimisation, so that the page ranks highly for the target keyword phrase. This can be achieved by keeping the HTML as simple as possible and cutting back on as much clutter (JavaScript, widgets, etc) as possible. The second aspect of a landing page is to have a clear call to action. The biggest sin an SEO specialist can make is to get a top ranking on Google and then not enable the visitor to be converted into a customer.

37. Think Like a Search Engine

To make the most of your SEO strategy you need to think like a search engine, and that means looking at others’ code. The best way to understand how a search engine will see your site is to visit your home page and then take a look at the HTML source code. There are various ways to do this depending on the browser you are using. In most browsers, however, simply right-clicking in some space on the page will reveal a menu that has an option to View Source. A simple test is to look at how much content is near the top of your page when you view the code, as it helps the search engines if you have quality content that explains what your page is about near the top of the page.

38. Integrate Search into Other Marketing

Search engine marketing needs to accurately reflect the wider marketing approach of your site. Keywords and site descriptions should mirror, reinforce and further develop the whole marketing theme. The benefits of this approach work in reverse too – if your campaigns have synergy and the same core keywords are used in other sites that link to yours, that will increase the search engine’s confidence in the authenticity and importance of your site, and push it up the rankings as a result.

39. Undertake a Usability Study

You need to design your site for your visitors rather than for search engines. It’s all well and good having a very search engine friendly page that gets you a good ranking initially, but if people don’t like it then your bounce rate will quickly increase, which will have a negative impact of the search engine’s view of your page. To avoid this scenario, incorporate a usability study at the outset of the design and development process: by profiling and assessing the needs of your customers, your designers and developers are much better placed to know how to take your website forward. The natural consequence of this usability process is that it will help to define your website’s information architecture.

40. Go Multilingual

Of the billions of web pages that Google, Bing and Yahoo crawl, more than a third of them are English. In most countries, in addition to using their own language, company websites tend to use English rather than other more local languages. Clever marketers can take advantage of this and go multilingual, but you need to know what you’re doing. Carry out a web market analysis looking at the probability of being competitive in the search engines in the target language, how many have access to the web in your target regions in the target language, and whether there is genuine demand for your products or services.

Other Parts

50 Search Engine Marketing Techniques – Part 1 | 50 Search Engine Marketing Techniques – Part 2 | 50 Search Engine Marketing Techniques – Part 3 | 50 Search Engine Marketing Techniques – Part 5

About MB Web

MB Web is a web design, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and digital marketing agency based in Lewes, East Sussex, and with offices in Sussex, Surrey, London and Kent.
To talk to us about your web design, SEO or Branding project, contact Jake Judd or David Park on 01273 478822 or simply send us an email instead.