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You’ve Come to the Right Place. Now How About Your Customers?

How quickly can your customers find you? If your business winds up deep in a search results list, where listings are perceived as being less relevant, chances are your customer will go somewhere else. Using good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques will make your site more relevant to a web user's search terms. Take a look at both the wrong ways and the innovative ways to optimize your site:

The Wrong Way

Use of "Black Hat" SEO techniques

Say you sell organic produce, and in an effort to increase traffic to your website, you throw into your web content loosely related keywords such as "tractor" and " scarecrow." This is known as keyword stuffing, and while it may temporarily increase visits to your site, it will result in a poor user experience: someone who types in "tractor" is probably not looking for organic peaches.

Search engines look at both the keywords and the content of a website, and are smart enough to notice any discrepancy. Using keyword stuffing and other practices deemed "black hat" (for example, adding hidden text to your webpages) can actually make your site appear irrelevant to search engines and cause your business to fall off the search results list. Even after correcting those practices, it can be months before your site reappears on the search result list.

Not using internal anchor text

You often see "click here" or "more" as the anchor text on links that take you to another webpage. This is a lost opportunity to help search engines understand what the destination page is about. For example, "click to see list," is far less descriptive than "list of seasonal vegetables." Someone looking for produce will type "seasonal vegetables," not "list" into a search box. Search engines will read your anchor text and use those words to properly index your page.

Having a "fix it and forget" mentality

What works today may not work tomorrow. Yes, it can change that fast. You may set a search strategy that helps you meet your goals, but when a search engine updates its search algorithms, you'll need a simple way to adapt your SEO strategy.

The Innovative Way

Plan SEO from the start.

Incorporate good techniques throughout development and regularly assess and update your SEO strategy.

Write descriptive content and keywords.

Write content for the customer, and not to the search engine. Do ensure that a keyword is present in the title of an article but focus on creating quality content and not on setting a record for the most occurrences of a particular keyword.

Use a good content management system.

Does your system give you the ability to customize title tags, headings, and anchor text? Some content management systems (CMSs) may allow these basics, but then your website may wind up full of duplicate content or turn out to be crawler-unfriendly.

The right tool facilitates the use of good SEO techniques. Our solution, the CrossLink™ content management tool, helps your web professionals and marketers do the following:

  • Optimize your website content for search engine marketing
  • Select title tags, headings, and anchor text
  • Fully control both dynamic and static web content
  • Comply with web accessibility regulations
  • Analyze your web content and keywords to ensure you stay on message

CrossLink Suite. Less Maintenance. Better Marketing.

Request more details on how CrossLink can streamline your web content management and boost your online marketing at 1-888-242-5751.