Posted by: Brooke Caesar, Account Manager

Building the keyword list is the backbone to any successful search engine marketing campaign. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you end up chasing dreams of grandeur. If you target keywords that are too niche, you’ll get the results, but not the traffic. There are many steps in finding the right balance that will get the results and the traffic.

Begin your strategy by brainstorming keywords that are central to your organization and your audience. Once you have compiled a complete list, move onto what your competitors find important. One of the keys to creating that successful keyword strategy involves investigating what is central to your competitors’ strategy.

Review their meta data
What keywords are they using? How are they enticing people to come to their site (call to action)? Go to the competitors’ site and view their code. Take a look at the keywords that they think are beneficial by looking at their title, description and keyword tags. read more »

Posted by: Sean Voorhies, Marketing Coordinator

Once you’ve set your keyword strategy, what do you do with all of those terms? Here’s your primer on putting keywords to work for website visibility.

Meta Data
Title, description and keyword tags (all part of your behind-the-scenes meta data) are valuable locations for keyword optimization. Place your most important keywords early in your tags rather than later. While each engine has different title and description character limits, it best to use the least common denominator to avoid having text cut off. Using the following guidelines for each tag can help make the most of your rankings across each engine: read more »

Posted by: Leslie Russell, Marketing Coordinator

Your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign is in place, but what are the metrics to measure its success? Are people really finding your site through organic listings? Are you bringing in new qualified visitors? Are your keywords the right keywords to optimize for? The success of your SEO campaign can be assessed in many ways:

Keyword Rankings
When you began your SEO campaign, you determined a list of keywords to optimize for. Before optimizing, conduct some searches on the top three engines – Google, Yahoo! and MSN – to see what sites are coming up within the first page of results. Throughout the SEO campaign, perform spot checks manually, or utilize tools (some of which are subscriber-based), to determine if your site’s rankings have improved.  read more »