Search Optimization Basics

We all want new customers to find us and be attracted to our brand, product, or service offering. I think the focus should be on optimizing our marketing efforts to make it easier to be found in the crowd; the crowd being our target audience.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is just a part of that effort. We really need to consider Marketing Optimization as our primary activity.

In the past, you needed an address and a phone number to conduct your business. It was important to be found on lists where your prospective customers were looking and could contact you whether they visited your location or not. This gave rise to the telephone books and the yellow pages where it was important to be found under business categories that related to the services you offered. Display ads became a method to stand out from the crowd with similar business offerings.

Today, you need an internet address and a descriptive name to be found, conduct your business, and encourage a connection from your prospective customers. A web based address is called a URL. Your URL is probably more important today than your physical address and maybe even your phone number. That means that the lists we used to be on do not carry as much weight as the lists that appear during key word and phrase search results.

Your online presence should be easy for prospective customers to find you when they are looking for your occupational specialty, location, business category, product, and solution specialties. You can achieve respectable search results with very little effort and absolutely no understanding of SEO techniques by simply participating in a few simple online marketing areas.

Minimum Online Activity

• Create an online profile for your personal name and business that includes a well-defined occupational specialty, location, and associated business categories. A free profile may be sufficient to begin with but you will eventually want to invest in your own cyberspace real estate.
• Develop content that will encourage your visitors to browse your service offerings, receive some worthwhile value, and become a regular fan.
• Develop some form of conversion tool to build your prospective customer following.
• Then register everywhere you can with link-backs to your property to drive traffic while you run regular promotions and marketing campaigns.
• Regularly participate in online social media interactions with link-backs to your property

It’s not much different than old media advertising, it’s just using a different media with some different rules and a new sales process.

If you make this a part of your regular marketing activities or hire someone to do it for you, you will be providing the search engine robots with what they are looking for and you will naturally be indexed and eventually get found. It’s not magic and it’s not difficult. Enjoy.