SEO Power: If You Build It, They Will Come…

… or will they?  You hear marketers today throw around a lot of three-letter acronyms related to their online presence such as SEO, SEM, PPC, CTR and CPC (just to name a few), which all lead up to the biggest one, ROI. And when you go to build your website, you should incorporate important elements such as title tags, headline tags, alt tags, meta data, meta keywords and page descriptions in addition to your body copy and images. This should land you within the top 10 search results on Google, right? Not necessarily. While we’d like to say you can build a website and then just sit back and watch it rise in search engine rankings, we can’t – so instead we’ll offer up a few tips.

• Keep your content up to date and refresh it on a regular basis. Search engines see updated content as being more relevant and thus can help increase your rankings. Don’t know where to start? Create a content calendar of monthly/weekly things to update on your site and stick to it.
• Build link partnerships. The more sites out there pointing back to your website that are relevant links, the more likely you will see an increase in rankings and traffic. Curious as to how many inlinks or backlinks your site has? By simply typing “linkdomain:www.codero.com” in the main Yahoo! search field it directs us to a results page for Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Then by clicking on “Inlinks” under results we discovered 2,089 pages link to the Codero homepage.
• Utilize an analytics tool. It’s important to identify what keywords and phrases drive the most traffic to your site – and ultimately make the best conversions. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be costly. Google Analytics is an excellent free tool, and with the help from a blog on SEOmoz.org, we found a great post that helps set up advanced segments to track unique keyphrases.
• Be patient. It usually takes a minimum of three to six months to see results for a search campaign.      

To see more immediate results, you might consider creating a PPC campaign to complement your SEO efforts. Since paid campaigns drive traffic as soon as they are activated, together they give a balanced short-/long-term online strategy. Good luck, and happy rankings!

Have you set up a PPC campaign or had success with your SEO efforts?  Leave us a comment!