PullnotPush President Dan Ronken takes you through the best practices for On & Off Page search engine optimization (SEO). Practicing good SEO tactics is an essential component to any inbound marketing strategy and one of the best ways to get found by new customers.
Small NYC Orchestra competing with major players (The Met, NYC Philharmonic, Carnagie Hall, etc) Site not showing up in search results for anything other than orchestra name No blog implemented into site; claims there’s no time for performance staff to contribute. Site has minimal external links Page not properly optimized to be found for relevant keywords.
Relevant to your business Searched often Easy
Clarion’s competitors don’t implement the best on-page SEO tactics Bigger orchestras rely mostly on external links
Not your company name Choose target keywords Reflects page content Brief
Search engines love it when your page title, header and content copy use the same target keyword. "Meta-descriptions are what generally appear in the search results (the first sentence is not in the copy itself)
Use only one H1 per page The shorter the better Place keywords near the beginning of H1
“Alt” attributeFile name (i.e. file-name.jpg)Use file types: jpg, png, or gif
Relevance: valuable links are relevant to your market, industry or community. Context: valuable links are contextual and come from sources with keyword-focused pages. How do you know if a page is keyword-focusedDifficulty: in general, valuable links are difficult to obtain. Valuable links are not inexpensive to secure, and they’re not easy to secure. The most valuable links come from sources where your competitors are unlikely to get the same link.Humanity: valuable links require a human element to obtain. We all like direct link sources, but quite often the most high-value backlinks come from sources that have a human being in control of the website. Credibility: a quality link comes from a credible source. Credible link sources elevate the perceived credibility of the site they’re linking to because they’re already trusted sources.Authority: working alongside the credibility quotient is authority. High quality links come from authoritative sources, either in your niche or in the wide environment of the web.Investment: valuable links require an investment of some sort. This factor goes hand-in-hand with the Difficulty factor. There’s an associated cost involved, whether in the development of a targeted piece of content or survey, in the purchase of the link, in the design and launch of the site, or simply in the time required to influence the influencers.Link Neighborhoods – Relevance Build Links StrategicallyThere are many different ways to build links. Creativity, Patience, Smarts, and Hard Work is the best way to get it done right.
The triangle is segmented into 6 steps. Working up the triangle, the links get more valuable (only as a general rule) and more expensive. The 2nd step contains link sources such as email lists, forums, blog comments, and social media profile pages.The 3rd step is reserved for places like article sites, niche directories, human-powered search engines and guest blog postings.The 4th step contains techniques like basic social media marketing (creating Myspace pages, Facebook groups and profiles, etc) and online public relations.When we reach the 5th step, we’re getting into advanced link acquisition territory: reaching key influencers (Rand Fishkin’slinkerati) through social media.The pinnacle and 6th step of the triangle is reserved for the Hilltop: authority sites at the center of Google’s Trustrank (which is starting to appear out-dated and vulnerable, but is still essential to their algorithm). For 90% of sites in a market, these are unobtainable links and come from sources like the US Military, government offices, libraries, universities, non-profits, high-traffic Wikipedia pages, old-school individual sites and so on. These sites normally require very topical, high-quality, and mostly non-commercial content (not to mention a concerted effort) to acquire links from. But they’re imminently worth all the trouble.