Learn how to leverage strategies on and off of your website to ensure that you are building your online reputation correctly and to drive traffic to your site.

1. By Chris J. Everett, Principal & Founder
Captivate Search Marketing

2. Is your business behind the times when it comes to adapting to marketing
online? You may know it’s important to get found online but have no clue how to
get there.
If you have only heard of “search engine optimization” and you think it’s black
magic that gets you to the top of the search results, there is a lot more you
need to know.

3. SEO is a myriad of strategies, both on-site and off of your website that work to
build your website’s (and your brand’s) online reputation in order to drive you
toward the top of the search results.
If you’re an SEO novice, we have broken down 10 essential things you need to
know about search engine optimization strategies.

5. 1. Each Core Page Should be Fully
Keyword Optimized
This obviously starts with solid
keyword research on your
company’s products or services.
Then each core page on your site
should fully keyword optimize the
following elements to ensure optimal
SEO friendliness
•
•
•
•
meta tags
URLs
on-page content
header tags

6. 2. Duplicate Content is a Death Sentence
It is vitally important that the content on your website be valuable for users
and completely original. Scraping other websites for content and just plain
copying won’t get you ranked – and in some cases it can get you penalized
by the search engines. Don’t be a fool. Be original.

7. 3. Don’t Ignore Your Company Blog
So often when you land on a
company website that has a blog,
you might notice it hasn’t been
updated in months. What should you
do?
Blog your heart out about anything
relevant and interesting and/or
helpful to consumers. Blog about
your products or services. Blog about
your brand.
And make sure you’re linking to
related content both on your website
and to other trusted sources
throughout the web.

8. 4. Know that SEO isn’t Just About
No. 1 Rankings:
Merely getting people to your
website isn’t the end goal. Getting
those users to convert IS the end
goal.
No matter if you’re trying to
convert a sale, signup, or contact
form, you need to make sure your
website is primed for conversions
with easy to navigate pages, strong
calls to action, and a super easy
way to contact you – on every
page.

9. 5. Create an on-site HTML based Sitemap
Your Sitemap is a blueprint of your website’s architecture.
It lists each page on your website and can not only aid visitors with a more user
friendly experience, but also makes it easier for the search engine bots to crawl
and index your website.

11. 6. Establish Several Off-site Blogs
for Your Business
One of the critical keys to building rankings is establishing a content marketing
strategy that produces valuable content that gets in front of searchers and builds
relevant back links.
Blogging is absolutely essential for this, so you’ll want to widen the reach of your
brand by building more than one off-site blog.

12. 7. Guest Blog Righteously
Guest blogging, offering free content
on other websites in exchange for a
link, is a very popular means of building
back links for your website.
But you must be cognizant of how you
go about your guest blogging practice.
Be sure you seek out high quality
websites that don’t appear spammy,
and are also topically relevant to your
own website’s content.

13. 8. Don’t Turn a Blind Eye to
Video Marketing
One of the keys to effective
content marketing is
diversification of the content that
you’re producing.
Video marketing is a highly
interactive and effective channel
for reaching consumers. Videos
can also be search engine
optimized themselves, allowing
for further exposure for your
brand in the search results.
Another great thing about
video is that not everyone does
it, so you should!

14. 9. Socialize Like Your Business
Depends on It:
Because it does. Social Media is a critical aspect of off-site SEO. People are now
flocking to social networking sites, and you need to make sure your business
does too.
Create a Facebook profile; a YouTube account; get on Foursquare, Google+,
Twitter. Engage your customers. Share your content and reap the rewards of
inbound traffic from your social media presence.

15. 10. Integrate Your
Google+ Authorship Rich Snippet
While establishing this is a combination of on-site and off-site, integrating
the code snippet that ties your website to your personal (or your Business
Owners’) Google+ page leads to a variety of benefits, one of which is
having your headshot in the search results, which studies have shown to
entice much higher click through rates from the search engine results page.

16. Now that you’ve heard the basics of on-site and off-site things you need
to know about SEO, do you think you have a better understanding of
search engine optimization and what strategies your company needs to
enact in order to achieve its goals?
We’d love to hear from you. Leave your comments.