Superior SEO

If you're looking for ranking on the search engines be sure that your team is using superior SEO tactics to get you there.

There are several things that you, as the client, want to watch for when contracting an SEO design team to work on your internet marketing approach, remember, if you want a superior result, you have to put in superior work!

First and foremost in any SEO campaign is keyword research. If you aren't using keywords that are both relevant to your business and driving traffic, then you're just wasting your time. One of the ways that you can check on this is by asking your SEO design team to provide you with the list of keywords they are intending to target for your site. When you get this list you want to do a couple of things:

1. Search for each term in quotes - This will give you a list of sites that are using this exact phrase. Check the sites that rank 1 - 3 for this term. If they truly are your competition, then this may be a good term to go after.
2. Search for each term without the quotes - This will give you a list of sites that are optimized for the term as it is. This gives you an idea of the competition you're up against for the phrase. Don't shoot to high, or too low here.

In order to ensure that your team is using superior SEO design techniques is to have them provide you with the metadata they intend to put on your site. The metadata, such as title, description, etc., is very important to the search engines and is used to help determine what your site is all about. Remember, Google has grown up. It no longer wants to see sites that are about everything, but rather it wants to see sites that are about something very specific. The more targeted you can make your website, the better results you are going to see on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). There are a wide variety of metadata that can be used on your site, at the minimum your team should be using title, description, subject and classification. There are occasions where other metadata is also useful, but be careful and make sure that they are not using the same text in any of the metadata or Google can end up penalizing your site.

The last thing I'm going to cover in this article is proper use of header tags. Header tags come in 6 strength levels. The H1 tag should be the main phrase that describes what your site is all about. This tag should incorporate your most important keyword phrase. As you move up in numbers you move down in the strength of the tag, so H2's are stronger than H3's, etc. Each subsequent level should nest inside the higher level. What you're looking to do is build a pyramid of phrases that all lead up to your H1 tag at the top of the pyramid. Proper use of header tags is the most commonly overlooked piece in the superior SEO puzzle. I'll deal more on header tags in my next post.

Please let me know if this helped you in determining if your team is using techniques that can be considered to be superior SEO.