In 2012, small business owners need to be aware of search engine optimisation more than ever. This month, Google has announced their new innovation called ‘semantic search,’ which means that the search engine now is trying to understand the meaning behind your words and content. Now, more than ever, your content matters, and the demand for unique well written content has never been stronger.
So, how can you take advantage of this to give your business and SEO boost?
1. Well Written Title and Header Tags Never Get Old
No matter what happens with 2012 SEO trends, title tags remain a vital tool in your search engine optimisation strategy. Your title should grab attention and inspire the reader to want to learn more.
When writing for online content, you can walk a fine line between creating headlines that will draw in readers, but still be attractive to search engines. When coming up with your title and meta tags, think about it as if you are trying to chose a snappy article title and include the content’s main keyword.
However, beware of placing too many keywords in your tags. Most search engines have a limit and will penalise a site for what they consider keyword stuffing.
2. Fresh and Detailed Content Wins
Late last year, Google announced a change to their algorithm that uses the freshness of the content to rank your page. These changes impacted 35% of all searches, and gave priority to fresh, relevant content. The implication of this was that website owners who regularly add new content to their sites are now rewarded with higher rankings. In addition, Google has always prized longer, more detailed content, and with the new semantic search this will become even more important. Posts or articles with a large amount of useful information can also often attract more inbound links, boosting your SEO.
3. Social Media Marketing Works Like a Charm
Never underestimate the power of a good social media marketing campaign. Google has already announced its intention to include links and references from social media into the results. As sites such as Facebook continue to gain traction, and more detailed content is shared on social media, this will only become more common and social media’s impact on SEO will continue to grow. The best way to leverage social media is to create content that is interesting and useful, so that it is quickly shared by your readers.
4. Distribute Your Content
While the Panda update in 2011 diminished the effectiveness of article marketing, distributing your content across various sources still has SEO benefits. Create a great blog post, write a press release about this post and distribute it to online networks. Post about the blog post on your social networking sites, and then if you are active on other blogs or industry forums, mention your post there (don’t spam!). By building relevant and varied backlinks to your content, you are helping Google find your fresh, relevant content and helping your site have long term SEO success.
So, where do I start?
While the fundamentals of SEO, such as well designed websites and building backlinks are still important, in 2012, more than ever, your online marketing should switch to focus on content. Take care to craft your content well, provide lots of detail and relevant examples, and then distribute this content across various sources, paying particular attention to building your social media profile. Do this and you’ll be future-proofing your site for 2012 and beyond.
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