Three Overlooked Ways to Improve SEO Results

To keep up with changes on the SEO landscape and make sure I’m consistently utilizing the most effective techniques on behalf of clients, I read a lot of articles and blog posts about SEO. Most still focus on the same basic areas:

• • Keyword research
• • On-page optimization (content, headings, meta tags)
• • Links (external and internal)

And to be fair, even with all of the changes in search over the past year, those basics remain vitally important to search success. But here are three areas where many companies aren’t realizing the synergistic benefits of coordination with their SEO efforts:

Blogging: given that less than half of companies—both small businesses and the Fortune 500—actively maintain industry blogs, this is an underutilized area for SEO benefit. While there are several benefits of business blogging beyond SEO, the ability of a blog to enhance an organization’s presence in search is substantial. Blogs are a source of fresh content, which search engines love. It’s easier to incorporate new keyword groups, naturally, in a blog post or series of posts than it is to rewrite sections of a corporate website. And blog content is more likely to attract natural links from other sites than is standard marketing copy, as it’s inherently more interesting.

Public Relations (PR): trying to manually build links from high-quality sites is difficult, tedious and time-consuming. But a well-written and optimized press release can generate dozens or even hundreds of links from quality news sites and blogs overnight. First, make sure the press release itself it well-optimized (e.g. keywords used in the title and early in the body copy). Then include text links back to specific pages on your website, e.g. linking a term like records management software back to an informational page devoted to that topic. Finally, use online press release distribution sites to spread your news far and wide.

Social Media: while social media adoption is rapidly increasing, these efforts aren’t always coordinated with SEO or appreciated in terms of search benefits. If a company has a quality Twitter following, its Twitter account is likely to appear in the top five results in branded searches. Links from social bookmarking sites can improve the rank of content-rich pages buried in your site’s navigational structure. The major search engines are increasing incorporating social signals into their search results. And it’s important to recognize that not all search happens on search engines any more; it’s also important to optimize for search within social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

By getting different teams working together and integrating these efforts with SEO, enterprises can maximize both the direct effects of strong PR and social media activities as well as increasing their visibility to buyers through search.