Posted by: Erin Wilson, Marketing Coordinator

Although Google continues to own the majority of the search engine market, Bing’s continued growth makes it necessary to think beyond Google when optimizing your website. Fortunately, most search engines rank their results based on many of the same criteria.

Below are four key areas to focus on when optimizing for search engines, particularly Bing:

Content and keyword placement: Great content is the best way to improve search rankings. Pay attention to where your keywords are located; use page titles, H1 and alt tags and linked text. Referring to Bing Webmaster Center is also a great way to stay on top of any changes.

Inbound links: Inbound links are important for any engine, especially Bing. Focus on obtaining a large number of links from other relevant pages.

Well-built website: A technically sound website with validated code, no broken links and proper redirects is important to Bing. Also, make an effort to use static URLs instead of dynamic URLs.

Domain age: Bing’s algorithm prioritizes older domains. Search engines are always looking to establish authority and domain age is one way to accomplish this.

Although it is important to include Bing in your optimization strategy, make sure you’re continuing to optimize for Google as well.

Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

When managed properly, company blogs are a great way to keep readers up to date on company and industry knowledge, and can be very useful in improving a company’s online visibility. Implementing the following optimization best practices can help improve both your blog and your website’s organic visibility within the search engines:

• Use a relevant keyword in your domain: When naming your blog, consider using an important keyword in your URL.

• Use relevant keywords in content: When writing content, consider common keywords and key phrases people would use to learn about your product(s) or industry. Include these keywords within your blog title and body copy with the most important keyword included in your title.

• Link to various pages of your website: Include links back to your website within your content to increase the number of incoming links to your website. Be sure to link to more than just your homepage.

• Include relevant anchor text: When linking to another page, use relevant keywords as your anchor text and hyperlink these accordingly.

• Submit to directories: There are many online directories where you can submit your blog to further increase its reach, such as BlogCatalog.com. This will increase the number of relevant back-links to your blog, increasing the importance placed on your blog by the search engines.

• Update frequently: Post content to your blog frequently so it does not go stagnant.

Try using these tips to improve your blog’s organic visibility within the search engines. Ultimately, they can help improve your website’s visibility as well.

Posted by: Christy Roth, Project Manager

Is online video a part of your marketing mix and, in particular, your SEO strategy? As online video usage continues to surge, more marketers are focusing on how video can integrate into their search programs. The following YouTube statistics show how prevalent online video has become:

• 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Approximately 120 decades of video are uploaded in a year

What can your company do to make sure that your videos are ranking high in search results and are visible to relevant users? Much like your site content and meta data, you need to make sure that your video title and description are keyword rich (without being spammy) and applicable to what the user is looking for. Think about what terms users that are interested in your video would use to search and work to incorporate them into your copy. You can also provide keyword tags for your video to increase search visibility.

read more »

Posted by: Erin Wilson, Marketing Coordinator

The start of 2010 brought a lot of changes and updates to search engine optimization practices. SEO is constantly evolving, making it necessary for companies to stay up to date on current trends.

Here are the top three SEO learnings from the start of 2010:

1) Incorporate social media into your overall marketing strategy to increase visibility. In an effort to make search a more interactive experience, search engines are focusing on incorporating social media into their results. Companies who are on board with social media have reaped the benefits through increased visibility. Users can now see social media results related to their search request and select websites they want to see more of, essentially customizing their search results. If you are not a part of social media yet, consider getting involved.

read more »