As business-to-business marketers implement next-generation websites that feature enhanced functions, many companies have not yet taken advantage of even the most basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. In most industries, SEO can be critical to achieving improved search results for websites — thereby increasing website traffic, and quite possibly sales and market share.
SEO relates to website programming, design and development as a foundation to increase or optimize search engine results that include your industry’s keywords. As more and more business is conducted through the internet, how can business-to-business marketers leverage this important medium? An SEO foundation should include such optimization techniques as:
• Meta-tag coding
• Alt-tag coding
• Title-tags
• URL structure
• Site Index
• Link building
• Keyword content or “landing” pages
• Blogs and Social Media
Though invisible to the user, meta-tag coding uses html coding for keywords and descriptions of the page’s contents, thus enabling the search engine to correctly index the web page’s contents. Meta-tag coding is possibly the most fundamental SEO technique, yet critical to most search results.
Alt-tags are the file names, image captions or descriptions for images contained on your website. These are useful when search engines index or “spider” your website. The engines automatically turn off images and read only text. However, the engine does read image file names. Therefore, instead of image filenames such as “DCP0003.jpg,” images should be re-named “KEYWORD.jpg,” to increase search results. Title-tags are the descriptive words at the top of the browser window that, more often than not, only list the company name or website address. Like meta-tags and alt-tags, title-tags should be simple and keyword heavy.
Perhaps the most neglected SEO task is URL structure. When linking to website sub-pages that are often served via databases, the URL that appears on the “http” line often includes obscure database code with multiple backslashes. To eliminate this search engine hurdle, ideal URL structures use the base domain name, along with simple keywords or keyword phrases in place of this coding, and eliminate excessive backslashes.
To continue reading this article and learn more about site maps, search engine ranking, link building, and role or blogs and social media in your company’s SEO strategy – look at Part II of the article: Search Engine Optimization: Top Priority Marketing for Business-to-Business
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[...] We have talked about meta, alt and title tags as well as link structure in our previous blog – ...