Hedging Your SEO Bets

Hedging Your SEO BetsSEO calls for using techniques and technologies in a way to bring about better performance overall. At times, unscrupulous SEO marketers use what are are referred to as ‘Black Hat’ techniques. Every year these people find new ways to try to compromise search engines and take away valued positions that honest webmasters work hard for. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are a number of additional techniques that people just don’t use that are honest but require time and effort. Never use Black Hat techniques because if you get busted by Google, the damage can be devastating and irreparable.

First of all, you need to honestly look at your site for professional errors. Get your site so well constructed that its foundation cannot be compromised. This means clear design, excellent copywriting, graphics, videos, pictures that are well tagged with pertinent descriptions. Make also sure your contact information is on every page so you can take advantage of the value of Local SEO. Once all these things are in place, it’s time to get busy.

Keyword placement is a high priority but in today’s highly competitive market, most marketers and webmasters just can’t afford to fight for those choice spots. Even if you rank high for your keywords, the competition will pile in on you and beat you down. You need protection and that protection comes from diversity in traffic and valued activity on your site. If you use social media correctly, your site will look like it’s a fish jumping out of the water. A site that is alive with activity and providing a value to the surfers. You have keywords, keyphrases, keygroups, and long tail keywords. Make the most of them and include them in all your communications that appear on the web. When you post to social media, add these valuable bits of information with a link back to your site. As people like and share your posts you’ll build up an opt-in series of external organic inbound links that will propel you up the search engine results.

Link building is still an essential part of SEO. Some would say it’s not as important as it used to be and others argue the opposite. What the naysayers are missing is that inbound links from specific venues is of greater value than just a bunch of links from other websites. Social media inbound links may well be more important than links from authority websites. Reason being, if the inbound links from an authority website are just static hyperlinks on a links page, it’s only sending traffic from a links page, which Google’s software will recognize. However, if your inbound links come from an active page like a blog and those links are in copy that is engaging and pertinent, it shows that the site finds your site as something worth noting. This is active SEO, not sedentary SEO. You want links in from active sites like blogs and social media so your site looks like it’s alive and kicking.

Use valuable tools like the suite of tools Google provides. These tools allow you to search for and efficiently apply keywords to your site that others may not be aware of. If you can’t get the top keywords, there are ways around that. Google is tired of spammy, money only sites clogging up their search results. They have advertising space for that so use their AdWords options to maximize your returns.

There’s an old telephone ad that stated, “Reach out and touch someone.”. That goes for SEO too. It takes some time and effort but it will pay off. Contact other sites anyway you can like email, comments, social media, even by phone and maybe even stopping by and saying hello. Show them that your site is a benefit to their surfers and bottom line and you may make for a long lasting friendship and professional relationship. These kinds of links can be of a major advantage as the companies you make friends with not only will have links to you from their site, but also on their blogs, email lists, and social media.

Overall, there are many cool ways to hedge your bets with SEO. It takes just simple time and effort and knowing your tools.