So, I’ve opened up a giant can of worms with this question. To be brutally honest, this blog is only going to touch the tip of the iceberg, but that’s where you have to start if you want to succeed. If you have an internet marketing agency doing your advertising and SEO, you’re on the right track. Unless you have that extra set of hands and another head on your shoulders devoted strictly to your internet marketing strategy, you simply cannot mentally keep up with both your business and your marketing.

The factors that affect organic rankings number in the thousands; so, I’m going to hit the big ones, the main rank movers. I’ll also touch on some SEO work that will affect you negatively.

The Tip of the SEO Iceberg

Hard work, patience, title tags, meta descriptions & content are the first things you have to focus on in order to rank well organically. I’ll touch on each one briefly, giving you an overview of how to get your ranking moving upwards as quickly as the search engines will let you – and how to do it the right way.

Hard work & patience go hand-in-hand. The truth of the matter is that it takes a while to get to the number one spot for your best keywords. Chances are, you are not the only business in your particular market. That means you’re competing with all of your competitors, who are targeting those golden keywords too. It takes hard work to research keywords & implement them in the proper way on your site, and once you’ve done that, the work isn’t over. It’s an ongoing process to improve your organic ranking. Speaking from experience here, it can take 18 months and an investment of $50,000 to get to the number one spot. Being #1 now and having made that initial investment, we’ve had a major return. Bottom line is, it takes hard work and patience, and you won’t see results overnight, so set your organic ranking expectations accordingly.

Title Tags are one of the first things a search engine sees after your URL, which is another thing that will affect your SEO. But let me stick to the main topic. Title tags play a major role within your website, and can drastically improve your SEO ranking. These are your headlines for your organic listings, and each correlates to the specific page it is on. Make sure when implementing title tags that they are relevant to the content on your pages as well as to your business services and service area. Title tags should be long tail (very specific) keywords that people who genuinely want your service would search for. Keep in mind that what you would search to find yourself may not necessarily be what the customer is searching.

Meta descriptions, or as we call them here at Marketing 360®, your Natural Listing Ad copy. This is your call-to-action, your 135-character-limited sales pitch. This should also be keyword rich, again using relevant long tail keywords. Although the search engines don’t place any ranking “weight” on the keywords in the meta description, it absolutely matters for the person searching for your product or service. The search engines bold the matching keywords in the meta description, catching the searcher’s eye and making them read your natural listing ad copy, which better entice them to click through to your website! Converting the website traffic is the next step, and we optimize for that too.

Organic Listing Example

Website content is another heavy hitter when it comes to SEO value and organic rankings for your website. Your on-page content also needs to be rich with keywords, written in a natural way, unique to your website, and you guessed it, relevant. Search engines read your website. The robots do, anyway, and they read just like you and I read: Left to right, top to bottom. They read header tags in the site, too; H1, h2, h3, and h4 titles, and so on. And while they are reading, they are also checking the entire web for content that is the same. Just like your professors in college, they will give you a FAIL if you copy content. Which means you can do everything right and still see no rank improvement if you have copied content. New and fresh content, like our natural listing ad posts, help a lot too. I like to call them love letters that keep the search engines coming back to your website for more!

Things That Hurt Your Organic Ranking

Just like the things that help improve your SEO rankings number in the thousands, so do the things that hurt it. Here are some of the major don’ts and a really quick overview of why not. This is based off of the things my clients ask about the most.

Buying Backlinks– No, please don’t do it! This is black hat SEO; companies that offer this give you good results right away, but search engines aren’t dumb. They take that good ranking you got initially, and take it away. On top of that, they penalize you, and may even blacklist your site. Once that happens, your investment is wasted.

Allowing Blog Comments– Yes, allow blog comments, but don’t allow shady, spammy comments. These comments often go to shady sites, which in turn bring down your online reputation. It’s like hanging with the trouble-maker kids in school; you’re guilty by association. If the comments are legitimate and link to reputable sites, however, they will help your organic rankings improve. You can also comment on others’ relevant, reputable blogs. This will help your SEO, too.

That’s All For Now

This should answer some of your SEO questions. Like I’ve said, this is only the tip of the SEO iceberg.  If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to call us, and we’ll get you on the right track.