Optimizing your website for search engine placement can be daunting. There’s much more than meets the eye with respect to SEO, and many providers want to promise you the world. Be wary! Some SEO techniques can actually harm your business. As a business owner or marketer, you don’t have to be an expert in SEO tactics to improve your website. But you do have to carefully select an expert who will give you honest, straightforward advice you can trust to help your business. Choosing the right search engine marketing firm is the first step. After a brief but pointed interview and/or series of email exchanges, you will most likely know when you have found intelligence and integrity.

Using SEO Best Practices

At SmartSite, our first goal is to help with “on-page” SEO, the improvements you can to more organically boost your search engine results. We follow established guidelines for above-board, honest, “white hat” SEO. These are published by Google and Yahoo for internet marketing professionals to follow. We also keep up to date on the evolving best practices in SEO – which change frequently and quickly. We participate  in industry associations like SEMNE , Search Engine Marketing New England, a regional association of search marketers who gather to learn, exchange information and network with other search marketers. And of course we also follow leading publications like Search Engine Land.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization Terms

Here are some terms you will hear when investigating strategies and tactics to optimize your website for better search engine placement:

SEO:  a system of strategies and techniques that make website pages more relevant than the competition’s pages, when searching for a particular set of terms

Keyword: a topic on the web

Content: The text on a web page

Inbound link: a link from another site to your site

Outbound link: a link from your site to another site

Spiders: programs that crawl from web page to web page by following links on the pages they are  collecting

Site map: a page on a website that links to all of the pages on that site

Page rank: a measurement of how “important” Google thinks a website page is

PPC: pay-per-click advertising, a way to advertise your website where you target specific keywords, then pay a fee for every prospect who clicks on your ad

Social Media: platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook that give you a forum for promoting your knowledge and expertise, and then enabling potential customers to link back to your website