You may be asking yourself if you should spend your resources on improving your SEO or improving your PPC campaigns. Ideally, you should spend resources improving your search engine optimization (SEO) AND improving your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. PPC campaigns are very different than SEO and cost money in both the time to set them up (or pay a consultant or firm to set them up) and the money for each click you receive. However, this does not diminish their value and importance in having a well-rounded web exposure strategy. At the very least you should be bidding on your company’s name or common misspellings of your company’s name.
But if you were to make me choose between having only a PPC campaign or an SEO campaign, I would definitely choose to put my resources into ensuring I have good SEO. The reason is simple. If I properly optimize my website, I will get the ranking I desire in Google, Bing/Yahoo, etc., and I don’t have to worry about continuing to pump money into a campaign to maintain that rank. That does not mean that we should take a “set it and forget it” approach to SEO. I’m simply saying that results from a good SEO strategy have longer lasting results than a PPC campaign whose results end the moment my money dries up.
Both SEO and PPC are very easy to get started and yet take a lot of work to “perfect.” I use that term loosely because I do not believe it is possible to have a perfect PPC campaign or a website that has perfect SEO. Anyone who tells you otherwise is fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Here are some good SEO tips to help kick start your website SEO.
1. Design your website with SEO in mind. If you haven’t yet built or published your website then you are in a GREAT position to make sure you use SEO best practices from the very beginning. I’ll have more about this in future blog posts and videos. Don’t worry if your website is already published to the web. Go ahead and start implementing these best practices today and the results will come!
2. Make sure you are taking a few minutes to fill out the Title Tag, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords fields. These fields are very important to search engines. These fields often determine the information that will be shown on SERPs (search engine results pages). You may have heard that Google does not give any weight to the Meta Keyword field and you shouldn’t waste your time filling it out. While it is true that Google doesn’t pay any attention to the Meta Keyword field, Bing/Yahoo does. It certainly doesn’t hurt you to use this field. Just make sure the info you put there is relevant to the page content.
3. Make sure you are using ALT TEXT on all images on your site. This is your way to tell the search engine robots (also called spiders) what is in the picture. If you have a picture of your latest widget, robots can’t tell the world about it unless you include the description of the picture in the ALT TEXT field for that picture.
4. If your website is very large you may be overwhelmed with the thought of where to start. Don’t worry. SEO is a large task, but it is not an impossible one. I suggest you start in one of two places. Either start by optimizing your most popular pages or your newest pages. Your most popular pages might be your best selling items, most searched for pages or most visited pages. Then keep identifying the pages that will give you the biggest return on investment (ROI) and optimize those pages.
Okay, that’s all for today. There is MUCH more that can be said and will be said about SEO. Dramatic Traffic is here to help the world find the path to your door. We want them to find your widgets. Let us know if we can help.
