You know you’ve won the SEO battle when your brand is found at the top of a Google search. That's the best place to be. It lets people know that your brand is the go-to source for what they're looking for, and it provides exposure that cannot be gained without a price.
Getting to the top of search engine results can be a hard climb. Google regularly updates its algorithms to enhance its user experience and to prevent brands and online entities from artificially inflating their search ranking. These changes are often discovered after they are already in place. Still, there are things brands can do to optimize website content without working about future Panda, Penguin or any other animal algorithmic changes.
With a tip of the hat to Mike Samec, director of digital strategy at Gibbs & Soell Business Communications, here are some ways to achieve better search results for your brand:
- Create meaningful content for your audience. Create unique, useful and interesting content for your target audience. Unique content will naturally attract links that will help your rankings in the manner Google originally intended.
- Provide unique meta data. TITLE and META tags appear in search results, so ensure every page on your site has a unique TITLE tag and META Description tag. Compelling tags will attract clicks regardless of position.
- Be social. Social sharing, from blogs to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, helps brands connect with their audience and can lead visitors back to the website.
- Share. Don’t be afraid to link out from your site to a third party site if the content is valuable and useful to your audience. Links out are as much a part of a normal organic link profile as links in to your site.
- Keep it fresh. Outdated, inaccurate content is of no use to anyone. Re-evaluate your content periodically and update or remove content that is no longer valid.
To learn more about shaping your content for Google, join PR News for the Google Conference, taking place in San Francisco on Feb. 11.
Follow Mike Samec: @msamec
Follow Richard Brownell: @RickBrownell