Tightening your budget? You can optimize your site to appear higher in the listings without spending a dime.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a fundamental part of your search engine marketing strategy, and the Schipul Houston Search Engine Optimization team can help you define that strategy.

Higher rankings in the natural listings (organic listings) of search engines will get your Web site more exposure to your target market if positioned correctly. However, a first page position in a search engine result for a particular term does not ensure success. There are many factors to consider when positioning a Web site within the search engines and their directories, including site design and architecture.

Factors for Long-term Success in the Natural Rankings:

• Target Marketing - The first step in search engine optimization is to determine and analyze your target. Ponder the demographic, psychographic and geographic attributes of your "bread and butter" sales to determine the specific target market you should reach out to with your Web site. All of your marketing efforts should be dedicated to this target market niche. Do not spread your marketing efforts too thin to be the "master of all trades." Doing this produces ineffective results in the search engines. You may feature all your "trades" on your Web site, but focus on and target the "bread and butter."
• Analysis and Research - If your Web site already exists, it will be analyzed for current search engine positioning, as well as your competitors' success with the target market. Research on keyword search terms will be analyzed for counts per month, price competitiveness and relevance to the target market. The current keyword density of the pages within your site will also be analyzed and then tweaked after research is complete.
• Web Site Optimization - The next step in SEO is to optimize your site with your strategically selected, targeted keywords. These keywords are chosen based on the research of actual searches done in the search engines. Then the chosen keywords are incorporated into the body text, title tags, text links, image ALT tags, and META tags of each page of your site.
  
  Example: If you sell water fountains in Houston, you would like for the search term " Houston water fountain" to appear in all of these places. Just be sure you have enough content so you don't look like you're "stuffing" keywords.
• Web Site Architecture - The design of a Web site is very important to search engine spiders/crawlers. If the spiders/crawlers cannot read the Web content, because it is all one graphic image or uses Flash, this will hurt your search engine marketing strategy. A minimum amount of text should be available on an optimized page, helpful graphic images should be supportive of the text, HTML code tags should be set up on every page, etc.
• Unique Content - It is very important that all content on your site be unique and rich in your targeted key search terms for SEO. Content that is copied from another site will hurt your site's ranking position in the search engines. PDFs, articles and newsletters all perform very well because they usually contain keyword-rich content. Visible, relevant and quality text used throughout the site will help you succeed in the search engines. A site that's updated frequently with new content will also encourage search engine spiders to re-visit the site frequently. Articles and press releases are a great way to continually add new content.
• Submission of Your Web Site - A Web site optimized for search engines must be submitted to the spiders/crawlers to be spidered and distributed across the Internet through several outlets. Once the site has been submitted, search engines will have records of pages that have been indexed.
• Link Popularity - If your site has many relevant quality sites linking to it, then its "page rank" will be higher than most, and the search engines will deem it more valuable than one with a lower "page rank" of relevant information.
• Avoid link farms. Natural, ethical site optimization and constant updates will ensure your long-term success in the search engines. A good Web site optimization strategy paired with a strong pay per click campaign will help you increase your exposure, and therefore your sales!

Use Schipul's SEM tools to get a jumpstart on your own site optimization!

Because higher placement in the search engines doesn't have to cost a fortune. Contact us to learn more: (281) 497-6567.

Got more questions? 

Visit the following pages for more information about SEM services offered by Schipul:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns
  
• The SEM Blog
• Search Engine Marketing Newsletter
• SEM/SEO Training Calendar
• Search Engine Optimization Articles
  
  

Want a little help getting started with the Search Engine Optimization of your site?

Schipul offers monthly SEM/SEO packages to help you get the most out of your online marketing dollars.

Call us today at (281) 497-6567 or submit a quick contact form!