The algorithms used by search engines to determine your website's placement are becoming more sophisticated. Good results used to be easier to obtain; now there are many more sites competing for attention. Traditional efforts such as tag optimization, well-structured code, CSS, image optimization and keyword density and other such factors are important. However, newer areas of optimization involve teamwork between your developer, you, your customers, and your potential customers. The web presence as a venue nurtured by a team seems to be a good model for success.
Blogging
The traditional model used to involve you in that you could specify a creative direction for your website developer, offer some initial content, and the developer would code it.
But today you can become even more a part of the team. Not only can you specify the creative direction of your website; you can become more involved in creating and improving your website.
The footprint of your website, i.e., the amount of information on the website, lends credibility to the site. If your site has a lot of information, it follows that you've invested a lot in it and that it is a good resource for people.
Blogging is an inexpensive and easy way to increase the amount of information on your website. We recommend that most of our customers blog if they can spare the time and if they can write compelling, professional content. WordPress is a great, free tool traditionally associated with blogging. But it can manage not only your blog, but your entire site, and your website designer can code it to look any way you'd like to best suit your needs. As a matter of fact, we've started to code most of our sites with WordPress.
Incoming Links, You and Your Community
Incoming links have always been a key area that boosts search engine placement. It follows that the more links there are to your website, the more credible your website. We recommend that our customers try to develop their incoming links as much as possible. Ideally this could happen in conjunction with a social media effort and by creating content and periodic articles that people find compelling; articles that they'd like to share.
In addition, you can develop your incoming links by becoming involved in other organizations. Volunteer to write blog entries on their blogs! It is usually appropriate to have a link to your website in your article on their blog, or even an additional couple of links to blog entries you've created for your own website. This is a great way to develop not only incoming links, but to become more engaged in a positive way with a community with which you'd like to network.
Ratings: Encourage Your Customers to Play
Your customers can become more of a part of your team, too. Google seems to need to know that other people care about your business or organization; this makes sense. I believe that business rating tools are becoming more important. I notice that placement in Google Places results seems to correspond with businesses that have been rated well by services such as Citysearch and the rating mechanism for each place page that Google provides. The more ratings, the better the placement, although this could just be dependent on the general popularity of the site. I have not really started pushing this strategy yet and don't know the result in terms of incoming traffic, but it seems to make sense.
A good approach to this would be to ask customers if they would place a review on your business or organization's Google Place page. That said, we'd appreciate a shout out on our Google Place page if you find these articles stimulating and/or if you are a client!
Be a Good Team Mate
Many variables are critical to the success of your web presence. We recommend being very thoughtful in the coding, presentation, and text content on your site. Ultimately, the key thing is to think like your potential audience and to try to anticipate its needs.
Consider conversion optimization when creating the core content for your site. Blog entries can be a bit more spontaneous, but the core service pages and home page of your site need to orient your potential client and give them a reason to want to participate, and make to it easy for them as well!
