Think of the Search Engines as Your Customers

If you want to improve your on-line presence, and all of us involved with social media marketing do, try thinking of the search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo as your customers.  Imagine that each one of your web pages is a treasure chest, and your customers, the search engines, want to know what is inside of it!

Help search engines open the treasure chests within your website by acting upon the following advice:

1. All of your web pages need to link to each other.  But don’t make visitors or the search engines make more than two clicks to access every page.  One click access is even better.  Some web designers mistakenly believe that the more complex each web page is, the more visible it will be to the search engines.  This is not true.  Your online visitors and Google want their experience on your website to be as simple “flat” as possible.  Social media marketing is all about helping others in any way possible.  Search engines know how frustrating it is for customers if they have to go through four or five layers to get to where they want to go – and they judge your site accordingly.  To find out more about this topic, you can review Google’s downloadable Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.  However, before you leave, here are a few more recommendations you should heed.
2. When possible, keep each web page’s address or URL clean and short – without any weird punctuation marks, equal signs, or underscores.  Also, make sure you use detailed, relevant keywords in the address that are pertinent to the information on the page. You will lose ground with your attempts to improve social media marketing and the search engines will dock you if your web page’s address has little to do with the actual content on the page itself.
3. Name your web pages.  You might overlook the title bar at the top of each browser window, but search engines don’t!  Give each page a keyword-driven, concise, title.  If you sell knit beanies, for example, don’t title your page “Keep your head warm.”  Instead, title it “Hand Knit Beanies.”
4. Be as descriptive as possible for the search engines in the descriptive fields as you are finishing the page and getting ready to publish it.  Think about this area as the text in a catalog.  In order to improve your social media marketing through smart search engine optimization techniques, you must grab the attention of the reader, and the description must be relevant to its web page.
5. Include a h1 heading tag to every article.  Without an h1 heading tag on each page of your website, search engine crawlers will have trouble understanding your content just as if you would have trouble reading an article that didn’t have a headline or title.

On a social media marketing note, if you use other people’s information, like I have for some of this article from Erin Weinger’s article “What you don’t know about SEO” (Thank you very much!), make sure you mention their assistance, and your gratitude for their help.  Who knows, you could even get a link back from them, increasing your online presence and optimizing your search engine opportunities.