How to Build a Search Engine Marketing Strategy Part 1: Onsite SEO

Marketing is all about discoverability. In the old days, potential customers and clients might discover your business by simply walking past your storefront. But how do you get discovered when there’s no physical building to stumble across? Nowadays, even if you have a brick-and-mortar establishment, potential customers are most likely to search online before heading downtown. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is all about helping people find you in the vast world of digital offerings.

Search Engine Marketing includes all your efforts to promote your goods and services online. The goal is to move your business closer and closer to the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). SEM requires a mix of onsite and offsite strategies. Onsite strategies center around building up the Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, of your business website. Offsite strategies involve investing in various forms of search engine advertising, also known as SEA.

In this article, we’ll focus on onsite strategies. Stay tuned for a discussion of offsite strategies coming up in Part 2. One internationally-acclaimed leader in Search Engine Marketing is Zurich-based author and entrepreneur, Roman maria koidl. In his lectures, he highlights 9 elements of a successful onsite strategy.

These elements include:

• Segmentation
• Title and Meta Tags
• File and Path Names
• Image Alt Text
• Headings
• Bolding
• Numeration
• Plain text
• Links

Segment your content

On any given search engine, the results will be organized into universal and segmented search results. Universal search results are displayed as the pages ranked by relevance in the main frame of the search window. Segmented search results are the category tags along the top of the window under the search bar that can be used to further filter a search into images, maps, videos, news, shopping, etc. Potential customers are often searching by segment or category rather than by universal search. Even if they begin with a universal search, they will likely filter down the flood of results by the segment most relevant to them.

You can increase your overall search ranking by ensuring that you have content listed in each of these segmented categories. The better represented your business is in each segment, the more likely you are to be discovered organically.

As an example, imagine you are a nutritionist looking to start an online coaching practice. You could boost your representation in each of these categories by building out your website with images, short videos, news updates about the business, a location pinned on the search engine’s map, and product descriptions for courses or session packages. Social media and other offsite web environments can also be leveraged as part of this overall segmented marketing strategy, but a well-planned, SEO-friendly website is the foundation for success.

Use title and meta description tags with effective keywords

A title tag is a short summary or headline for the content of a page. It should be carefully phrased using the keywords most relevant to and descriptive of your content. This title tag can be added directly to the HTML source code for the webpage, and it should be less than 70 characters in length to ensure that the whole title is visible in the browser.

A meta description tag is a slightly longer summary of the content of a page which is displayed beneath the title tag in search engine results. Like the title tag, the meta description tag should also include carefully chosen keywords that best describe your content using terms potential customers are likely to use in their search. This meta description is likewise integrated directly into the HTML source code as a sentence of less than 150 characters.

Incorporating your keywords into logical file and path names

File and path names are the names used to identify the unique location of a page in your website directory. These can include but are not limited to searchable domain names. Keep these names clear and descriptive so that search engine algorithms can easily recognize their relevance to a given search. Provide alt text descriptions for your images.

Business-specific visuals are a great way to build credibility for your website and boost your content representation in image-segmented searches. In addition to the actual image, however, it’s important to include a detailed description of 150 characters or less in the alt text of your HTML source code. This serves several purposes.

The alt text makes your webpage more accessible to people using screen readers. In addition, alt text is helpful for people accessing your website with a slow internet connection as the text displays while the image is still loading. For SEO purposes, alt text can also be “read” by the search engine to help determine relevance to a given search. Be careful about this one, though. The alt text must be descriptive of the image rather than the webpage as a whole, so make sure the images you include are targeted and specific to the reasons you want to be found.

Incorporate headings into your HTML

Headings are essentially the headlines of a webpage. The most important ones to include are a title (H1 heading) and a subtitle (H2 heading). These are picked up by search engines as they scan the “outline” of your web pages. For your human audience, font size will be the biggest factor in distinguishing the headings from the rest of the content.

For search engines, however, headings are signaled not by font size but by HTML heading tags. Be sure to delineate whatever text you want to set as your title and subtitle with H1 and H2 tags of less than 100 characters each. H1 always ranks first, and H2 always ranks second in search priority, so arrange your keywords accordingly.

Use bold font to signal key elements

Bolded words stand out to search engines just as they do to human readers. Search engines recognize these bolded words as key information that should be considered in ranking. Bolded text usually automatically integrates into HTML source code, but it’s always worth checking to be sure. As with all things, use moderation in your use of bold text. Bolded phrases should generally stay under 150 characters.

Use numeration to signal order of importance

Numeration is simply applying numbering to a list. As with headlines and bolding, numeration helps search engines pick up on and quickly scan the outline of your text. When you number items on a webpage, the search engine recognizes that there is an order in which you want information viewed. This will help the search engine do a better job of abstracting larger chunks of information in answer to a potential customer’s question.

Link to high-quality information

One of the best ways to help improve your search engine ranking is to incorporate external links to high-quality websites with content relevant to your topic. And even better are links from high-quality 3rd parties leading back to your site! External links boost relevance and discoverability, as well as credibility when the associated sites are well-established.

The credibility of the linking site is crucial to your success, so be very selective with this strategy. Alongside external links and 3rd party links, you can build out your website with internal links . While not as high ranking as external linking, internal linking among the pages on your own website can build credibility as you take care to provide visitors with useful, related content.

In addition to the content of the link itself, link quality is determined by the text used to mark it as well as the viability of the link itself. Always avoid bait-like “click here” statements when signaling the presence of a link. Instead, use descriptions of 150 characters or less so readers and engines alike know exactly where the link will lead them. It’s also important to make sure the links themselves are working properly. Broken links can decrease the reliability of your website both in human perception and search engine ranking, so it’s a good idea to do a regular quality check to make sure older links are still viable.

Develop a content strategy to boost the keyword density of your plain text

Plain text is the entire visible text of your website. It may be tempting to beef up your site with CSS, Javascript, image files, and multimedia files. While these can certainly increase the visual interest and appeal of your website, search engines don’t actually “see” this type of content and it takes up a lot of data. Instead focus on providing relevant, well-written information useful to your target audience.

With a smart content strategy, you can organically boost the keyword density of your site. Keyword density is calculated by the number of times a particular keyword occurs on your webpage. In the case of our nutritionist example, this word might be “nutrition” or “nutrition coach.”

This keyword should emerge naturally in the flow of the text. Avoid gimmicks like flooding your website with invisible white-on-white text. Search engines have evolved to recognize this trick, and they now even downgrade sites that use it. Similarly, search engines now downgraded sites that use “lorem ipsum” placeholder text or artificially repetitive keywords. At the end of the day, the best strategy is the most honest, well-crafted one. Focus on delivering excellent content, and the search engine will reward it – as will potential customers.

A strong SEM strategy begins with a well-planned website built and maintained with SEO in mind. If you’re unfamiliar with HTML, you can start learning how to adjust the source code of your website using Mdn html tutorials . If all that code gets you feeling a little queasy, or you just lack the time, never fear! we’re here to support you. . Now may be the right moment to invest in a web specialist or technical VA for the long-term success of your business.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

WRITTEN BY: DEBORAH STEVENSON