Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator

Where has the time gone? It has been over a year since you last updated the metadata so important to your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), you can’t remember when the content on your site was last updated and some of your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising keywords seem a little stale. Now is the time to see which keywords have been performing, revamp your keyword list and get a refreshed search engine marketing strategy rolled out.

Start off by doing a little investigation on the success of your last keyword strategy.

Phase 1: Research

·      Review your site in-depth. Have you updated content or removed content? Are you keeping pace with trends in your industry?

·      Glance at your key competitors’ websites. Are they using different language and keywords throughout their content or metadata? Reviewing their sites may spark additional ideas for your keyword strategy. 

·      Pull analytics reports looking at non-paid and paid keywords.  Consider if all of these terms are still relevant, or if there are new terms you haven’t considered before.

·      Use keyword tools to gather recommendations of adjectives, synonyms, plurals, etc.

·      Take a look your organic and paid visibility. Are you getting exposure for the keywords you consider most important? If not consider how to make those words a higher priority in your refreshed keyword strategy. 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 »