How Any Business Can Benefit From SEO

By Kara Taylor

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic these days. It seems every time you turn around someone is talking about SEO and how it is essential for any company that wants to make a go of it in today’s business world. But what exactly is SEO? And does your business really need it?

Well, SEO is a marketing strategy that is intended to give you a stronger, larger web presence. And with consumers turning to the internet more and more for their product and service needs, SEO is, indeed, a key part of finding new customers and increasing the visibility and profitability of your business.

Site Optimization

Optimizing your web presence can only be a positive thing. After all, how can people know how amazing your company is if they can’t find you? When looking for a product or service people are more apt to turn to the Internet, particularly the search engines than the yellow pages. If you have a poor ranking and a minimal web presence, then potential customers won’t be able to find you online. And that can mean lost sales.

You may think that only large business need and can afford to utilize SEO as part of their marketing strategy, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, a smaller business can sometimes benefit even more than larger companies who may already have a solid web presence.

SEO Strategy

While both large and small companies can benefit from SEO, there is a difference in how it is applied to each. Other things besides business size that need to be taken into consideration when developing an SEO strategy is whether or not your company is local or global and if you deal with products or services.

It goes without saying that a larger company will have more money available for marketing and therefore more money that can be allocated for SEO. On the flip side, larger companies will need a larger SEO strategy in order for it to work.

Larger companies will most likely also already have an established web presence with a high traffic website. Their SEO strategy therefore should be geared towards tweaking the existing website and making it more efficient in drawing traffic by implementing more and better keywords in product and service descriptions, emphasizing competitive pricing and delivery service.

Small Businesses

Smaller businesses may have newer or smaller websites and not as high a volume of traffic as larger companies. While keyword placement can help to direct traffic to the site, a much better option is to use link building in order to increase the website’s ranking and direct traffic.

Increasing your online visibility will help increase your sales and put your business on the map, even if you are a local company without global aspirations. Local people turn to the Internet for their information also. The proper linking and keyword use will put you on top of the game.

Link Building

If your company’s website is new, link building is essential regardless of the size of your company. You want to make sure that you are listed when people search for your product or service on a search engine. And, in order to be recognized and indexed you need to use link building.

The right link building will also ensure that your website is high up in the search results. The higher you are ranked, the more people will be able to find you. Think about it: when you search for something online, how often to you click past the first page of results? Not very often.

Your Strategy

SEO doesn’t just benefit the big chain companies. Smaller companies can also get use out of SEO. The key is to make sure that the SEO strategy is personalized and geared towards your business whether you are selling a product or providing a service.

Author Information

Kara Taylor is an experienced blogger and a specialist in SEO, social media and website content. She uses her knowledge to give expert advice on a variety of topics on a Q&A site. When she is not blogging, she loves to learn new recipes and cook for her family.

Photo Credit: Sachin Ghodke

Using YouTube Videos to Pick the Right Domain Name

By Duncan Heath

I recently had an idea about using popular YouTube videos to help inform your domain name choices, and thought I would share it here.

Many people set up blogs not to sell anything in particular, but instead to build powerful sites over time that they can sell advertising on, sell guest posts from or dare I say it…sell links from. When setting up these sorts of sites, not a lot of attention is given to domain names. Most people go for something that sounds “cool” or is otherwise a generic phase such as “everythingandalways.com”. However if you thought carefully about domain choice, you could kick off your site’s traffic and link building efforts with much greater ease.

Popular YouTube

The first thing to do is search on YouTube for very popular (or better yet famous) videos. You can do this by sorting all the videos by “most viewed” and setting the time scale to “all time”. Here are some examples: evolution of dance, tootin bathtub baby cousins, the gummy bear song.

Next, you should check out the competition for the terms in the SERPS and also the suggested search volumes in Google Adwords Tool (yes we all know it’s flawed but it’s a good indicator). You’ll notice that the official site for Judson Laipply appears top of the SERPS (under the video results) when you search for “Evolution of Dance”. It’s also worth noting that this site is a PR5 site and has backlinks from Wikipedia, PCWorld and Wired.com.

Popular Terms

With this in mind it might not be worth going after the “evolution of dance” term, but it does show just how popular a site like this can become. If you hunt around the terms related to the other videos above however, you’ll notice there is very little competition in the SERPS, and certainly no optimised URLs. Just doing a quick check, I can see that domains such as tootinbathtubbabies.com and gummy-bear-song.com are available to buy (at time of writing).

These domains represent brilliant opportunities as there will not only be a great deal of search surrounding the terms, but very little competition standing in your way. With a little onsite optimisation and some targeted link building you should be able to move to the top of the SERPS without too much trouble and may even be considered a brand after a while due to a specific domain name, specific link building using domain name terms, and high search volume surrounding “your brand term”.

Careful Choice

I wouldn’t use this technique to determine the name for my new clothing retail site, but for a general blog I would much prefer to have a domain name that already had half a million searchers per month relating to it, than something like everythingandalways.com, which I would suggest gets none.

Author Information

Duncan is an SEO and marketing professional promoting a villas in France enterprise. He’s always looking for new ways to get the most out of the SERPS.