These days SEO works hand in hand with Internet marketing strategies. SEO not only considers how search engines work but it also helps determine what people search for. People have started recognizing the power of SEO as a powerful tool for brand building. Branding is a vital part of all marketing, public relations, and sales tactics. Branding is the thing you do to make your brand exclusive and differentiates you from your competitors.
Search engine branding is a very vibrant form of marketing and will always be changing. It is an industry that is set to evolve and not become stagnant, leaving entrepreneurs and innovators to come up with new and exciting ways to spread a message on the web. As quickly as the internet is moving forward, there are some things that are just never going to change when it comes to building your business online. Here are a few SEO trends to watch in the near future.
Site Speed
Google testifies that site speed is now used as a ranking factor in 2010. Google’s goal is to help its users find information as quickly as possible. How quickly a site loads is a high-level deciding factor. It is smart to take steps to decrease the load time of your site. The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site. If you don’t know how fast your site is loading, tools like WebPageTest offer easy ways to test it out. If you find that you do need help getting your site up to speed, here are a few free resources available to help.
• HTML Validation checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.
• Page Speed Firefox optimizes your site speed.
• Closure helps you build rich web applications with JavaScript that is both powerful and efficient.
Engaging Content
The first step is to develop your web content goals—what you want the content of your Web site to communicate to your target audience. Content for your Web site may come from a variety of sources—print collateral, an existing Web site, other media, or the content could be brand new developed onsite by your web strategy team.
Keywords
This is probably one of the easiest and most important ways to raise your SEO. You can check out Google Trends for search volume estimates—how many people search the keyword. There are lots of keyword discovery tools out there. My favorite tool is Google Adwords. Adwords lets you distinguish which word has the best conversion rate. Be sure to take into account the search volume and competition. Don’t optimize your site for “marketing.” You’re not going to get to the first page and if you are not on the first page you probably will not get noticed. Pick slightly longer tail searches for your main pages, e.g. “optimize marketing tools.” And, for your deeper content, go for even longer tail queries: “optimize marketing tools in San Francisco.”
Website Optimization
Website Optimization is the process of specifically designing your webpage to rank high in the Search Engines. When designing your webpage, you must specifically design it to rank high in the Search Engines. Your keywords, title, image alt text, text, and overall design all play an important role in determining how your website will rank.
Testing is usually the most effective way to optimize websites. Through testing you can recognize what your target audience likes, which ultimately will help you create a better experience for your audience. Your target audience is not usually unique, so it is important use techniques such as Test Segmentation to understand the differences in the tastes of each cluster of your audience.
Domain structuring
Domain structuring for SEO marketing online is actually much harder than people think. Most people choose their company as a domain name, which is good for branding but not for SEO. You have to also have another site or domain that has content that is keyword rich or close to it. It is smart to remember that good keyword domains actually rank higher in search engines. This is because the search engine assumes, and usually is correct, that the domain name concentrates on that subject matter.
Real-Time Search Reputation Management
When Google put real-time search updates into the search engine results pages (SERP) they unleashed a very potential online reputation problem. Google is pulling from tweets, from blogs, from news, from articles and other Web content and throwing it immediately into your search results, often right above your own site. All of this means that you need to be even more vigilant about monitoring the conversation in an attempt to protect your brand.
Here are a few things you can do to increase your real time brand awareness:
• Use Twitter Search to track mentions of your name, your competitors’ names, important keywords, locations, etc.
• Use Comprehensive Google Alerts to track blogs and news sources talking about your brand.
• Use Social Mention to track anything the first two may have missed.
Link building describes anything you do to build links to a website. There are two primary reasons to build links; Direct Click-Through Traffic, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I am focusing on SEO in this blog. The goal of SEO based link building is higher ranking, through link-building efforts to increased rankings, traffic, and conversion for the specific keywords that you target. I have listed some common ways of link building below.
1. Content Distribution is the back links from press release sites, article writing, guest blog posts, feed aggregators such as RSS feeds, etc. You can best utilize this form of link building by write unique and SEO optimized content and promote using social media sites.
2. Social Media bookmarking is when you obtain Links from various social media profile pages and bookmarking sites. You can find these on top bookmarking sites with the help of sites like PageRankand Alexa Rank.
3. You can also purchase links. You can acquire these by searching for keywords and sponsor, advertise, sponsored by, banner ads, submit URL, add URL, etc. This type of link building can be very risky and your website can even get penalized by search engines if not used correctly.
4. Reciprocal Links is when you use links from exchanges, partnerships and trades with other topic relevant web sites or social media tools.
5. Embedded Content is links via widgets, info graphics, badges, and other embedded-able content. You develop visually appealing, valuable content, and you can promote via emerging media.
6. Link reclamation refers to the links that are no longer available resources to re-point at your pages.
Check Google Webmaster Tools for pages not found, contact websites linking to those to change link or redirect to your site.
8. Natural Links are the links obtained naturally due to link worthy content and link baiting techniques, etc. You should create quality, informative content, avoiding duplicate content and promote via social networks.
9. Link Requests is when you acquire links through manual requests from webmasters, site owners, etc. You can email requests by conducting competitive link analysis (this is a hot commodity for PR sites).
Whether you are a small online business or big one, branding is very important idea to hold simply because it sums up everything about your business that will leave an eternal impression on prospects. Once a potential client or customer visits your site through search engine optimization and if you have done branding properly, then the chance of them coming back increases. Smart branding seeks to make the products or services significant to the target audience.
Branding is directly linked with SEO and should go hand–in-hand. If branding is taken into consideration when the SEO campaign is being planned, the chance of getting success in both increases significantly. SEO increases the organic visibility of your site and does the same for your brand. In today’s web world, you can build a decent amount of brand awareness through SEO.
Golden Opportunities 