What techniques have you used to optimize your company's website for SEO?

Along side using rich keywords, descriptions and titles on every page, regularly updated, authentic content is critical. Authentic in that it means something to the audience, and is not just about you and how great your company is. Most people on the Web use search engines to find out how to get a job done or get answers to their questions, and each searcher has their own set of keywords. Authentic content on your website will provide this information and will naturally match searchers' hundreds and thousands of unique keywords, called long tail keywords. Each phrase attributes only a minuscule percent of traffic, but when added together accounts for, in some cases, up to 80 percent of Web page visits.

Josh, in addition to the good suggestions above, you should strongly consider having a company blog. It provides new content on a regular basis which is SEO friendly. Also, over time with good content, the blog and individual posts will garner direct backlinks for you.

I launched my site last summer and started a blog at the same time, frankly, with some level of skepticism. I can now say that it has really paid off with many rich backlinks not to mention that it gives your site some personality and content authority.

Geoff Vincent
CEO, BizCompare Inc.
http://www,bizcompare.com/blog

One of the quickest ways to come up in the rankings is to optimize for localized SEO. This means including the name of your city or region within your website content. For example, if you're in a suburb of Los Angeles, you could put in your footer "A Los Angeles area xxxx company". This will optimize you for Los Angeles even if you are in a city adjacent to Los Angeles.

As Reg has already said, keywords are key (no pun intended). Use Google's keyword (http://tinyurl.com/2w634qo) tool to choose the keywords to focus on. Do not choose words where 100s of thousands of people are searching. These will take forever to get a high ranking on. Instead choose some words with 0-5,000 searches are being done, and choose a couple with up to 40,000 searches being done. Many people do not optimize for these lower search words, so you can get up higher in the rankings much faster.

Don't make yourself crazy with the keywords. Choose 3-5 and focus on them. Once you're indexed and ranking well (takes at least 3 months), then choose others to add into the mix.

SEO is really an art, but here are some basic tips on how to optimize your site for SEO:

1) Use title tags (H1, H2, H3) to highlight titles on the page instead of customized CSS on each line. Put keywords into these title tags and search engines give them more weight than the rest of the text.

2) Interlink the content within your site. Many people forget this one, but it encourages more search engine exploration.

3) Make sure you have an XML site map that is linked from within the site (preferably the footer on every page).

4) Make sure you optimize the title tags within your HTML. This is something that appears above your meta tags and is the most important optimization for SEO. The title tag within the HTML does not have to make the title on your page, so be certain to put your localized city/region information in the title tag.

5) If you are using a content management system like Joomla or Wordpress, make certain you put in an SEO plugin that will clean up your URLs. Search engines do not like the gobbly gook URLs thrown out by a CMS.

6) There has been discussions in the last year about the value of meta tags (description and keywords). Rumor has it that search engines don't pay attention to these anymore because too many people did keyword stuffing. I would still include them, but do not agonize over them.

7) As several people have already said, generating new content is a big key. The more content you have, the more you get indexed. A blog is a great idea because then you can write short and simple information, and the amount of content will grow quickly.

And of course once you optimize your site, then you have to do SEO outside your site, but that's a whole other ballgame.

I hope this helps.
Regards,
Bonnie

I have been working for the past year on improving our website and its SEO. This is a continuous task, not a one time thing. Regular review of where our pages are and which ones are generating the traffic is critical. Without being too commercial you can't go wrong if you subscribe to the Hubspot blog ...Check them out at www.hubspot.com. They have more material than any one person can absorb and add more each day. Many of the tips above coincide with my experience.

I have found it much easier to grow our content by using the blog than by trying to add pages to our site but it is critical that your blog is part of your site not residing on some other web so that the SEO credit comes to you not the host. Too technical for me to explain but there are lots of articles on the web which will tell you how to do this.

Lee Kirkby
http://blog.leppert.com

@ Lee
While putting a blog on your site does help with SEO, it is not as effective as running a blog on a large service to take advantage of their (large) built in market.

To get the best of both worlds, use a hosted service but do not use full posts on the hosted service.
Write a synopsis on the blog and link them to the business website which has the full article.
This way you get anchor text links to deep pages (+ SEO for those that believe linking helps)
Both linked and linking pages are 100% relevant (PageRank bonus points)
You get two shots at tweeting. One when the article goes up and then when you do the blog.

The blog is short and would contain a higher concentration of keywords to text.

best,
Reg
nbs-seo.com

I agree with the statements above. As well a person should look at ensuring the keywords are specific and well targeted for conversion. There is no point in targetting a really broad keyword that yields to many varied results... It is better to be more specific and targeted. Especially as conversion is the key to success.

As well remeber to utilize these same keywords in cross linking and social media / blogging activities. The more you can direct traffic back to your site utilizing similar keywords, etc. The higher your ranking for those keywords will be. It is about establishing your expert status for those keywords to the search engines.

1. Follow standards and best practices of web development.

2. Write good content on a regular basis.

3. Have a coherent PR strategy.

Hi Josh,

I agree Corey and Reg! If you are looking into ecommerce, make sure to pick a platform that is innately SEO friendly.

Check out this white paper we created: The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing: http://www.volusion.com/assets_2010/pdfs/ultimate_guide_to_internet_marketing...

Good luck!

Best,
Molly
www.volusion.com
follow me on Twitter @VolusionMolly