Internet Marketing Blog

Christopher Steiner, Forbes.com

Pizzerias, welding shops, tree nurseries: They all need Web sites to pull in customers. Attracting those eyeballs involves seducing the algorithms of Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Americans tap search engines more than 12 billion times a month to find everything from guitar lessons to jambalaya recipes.

Most people don’t wander past the first 10 or so search results. The art of breaking into those rarified ranks is called search engine optimization, or SEO. If this term is new to you, get familiar with it–quick. (For a primer, start here.)

For the rest who want to fortify their online attack while not spending thousands of dollars on an SEO consultant, there are plenty of things to do beyond posting fresh content on your site, making sure to include search keywords and pointing to older links. All those tricks help, but the algorithms evolve constantly, and so must your site to stay near the top.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled some of the latest SEO tricks from those who know them well.

Content

Videos have become search-engine cat nip. Nearly half of all searches return video within the first batch of results. “Not only do search engines reward video, but customers turn to your company as a trusted source if you have quality content,” says Mary Spio, president of Gen2Media, a video technology company.

Lists are also popular with search engines. Readers crave them, bloggers reference and link to them, and search crawlers score them highly. Example: If you run a gourmet pizza parlor, posting a list of the best draft beers to go with your pie might get some attention. “A list is going to generate a lot of posts on other blogs, tweets and Facebook since they’re easy to digest and play off the human desire for simple, digestible content,” explains Allen Kung, chief technology officer of Createthe Group, a digital commerce consultancy.

Running your site in more than one language is another good idea. “Translation increases Web traffic, enables content to be shared and can be searched globally,” says Swamy Viswanathan of Language Weaver, a translation-software maker. Viswanathan says that certain types of content need to read perfectly and thus require human translation to register with the search engines; other fact- and statistic-heavy content can be sufficiently translated by a program.

Syndication

It’s not enough to produce entertaining content–you have to title and tag it correctly. Pay attention to phrases, not words. Example: Somebody wanting to learn how to sew will sooner search “how to sew video” than simply “sewing.” Title the video appropriately by including the entire phrase and don’t forget to tag it with a few relevant keywords.

Organizing and packaging Web addresses in a specific way is important, too. Stick files into clearly labeled directories. For instance: http://www.yourwebsite.com/videos. By putting videos in an obvious location search engines will be more likely to find it than if you stick them in a root directory or in a generic “directory A.”

Also be sure to embed the videos into the very pages of your Web site so that they play seamlessly as part of the site–not as files that viewers have to download to their own computers. (YouTube makes this easy with code that can be copied to your site.) Let the audience easily share your videos–thus increasing their popularity and attractiveness to the search engines–by including a “sharing” function on your site. “Your videos become ambassadors for your products and services, helping generate buzz and building quality inbound links,” says Spio.

Speed

Some Web sites load up faster than others. Everyone loves a nimble Web site–even Google. The company has suggested that it may start including page speed as a factor within its search rankings this year. (Usually when Google hints at something–think its new Nexus One phone–it means it’s about to do it.)

An easy way to see if your Web site hums or slogs is to use Google’s Page Speed plug-in for Firefox browsers. Install the plug-in and then run it while having your home page open. Another tool is called the “validator,” which rids your code of redundancies and inelegant programming loops. Other speed-boosters include “gzip,” which compresses your Web site’s files (using any easy-to-find compression software) and ensures your CSS and javascript code has no redundancies or inelegant loops.

Big Picture

Smart SEO strategies can yield big results, but don’t lose sight of the bigger goal: delighting customers. “Small businesses aren’t going to convert [sales] if their sites don’t make any sense,” says Gill Brown, vice president of Advertising Network Sales at LookSmart, a tech company that lures people to paid-for text ads. “Write content for the core audience first, then go back and consider varying keyword usage throughout the site.”

In other words: Try to game the system–just don’t overdo it.

Source: http://in.news.yahoo.com/240/20100121/1318/ttc-7269465.html