Is it just us, or is search engine marketing getting to be a big thing? First it was just HAVING a website. Next it was social media and now we’re trending more towards combining the two for an even greater return via search engine marketing. What’s next? Mobile technologies (well, yeah, it is actually)?!
All of this can be confusing and hard to understand. Luckily, there are a few good sites out there that put all of this information into one nice scorecard of sorts. Oftentimes, these sites will rank your website against others so you can see where you stand among your competition. Here’s a few of our favorite sites to get you started:
- http://websitegrader.com/
- http://www.seomoz.org/tools
- http://www.woorank.com
With these recommendations and rankings in mind, it’s time to get to work. If you don’t have a twitter or facebook yet, now is clearly the time. Still don’t even have a website? Well that’s a prerequisite to pass any of the tests above. Need to tweak your title tags or increase your inbound links? Better start editing and sharing now. These efforts require constant nurturing and maintenance.
When you’re done optimizing your site with these recommendations, double check to make sure that your site is still user friendly. Oftentimes you can throw all the best keywords into title tags, but have the end result look like garbage to your customers. In our opinion, the customer experience is first and foremost and all else lays somewhere behind that. There is a certain sense of give and take here to be professional and found vs playing the system for short term recognition.
After your site has been tweaked to your satisfaction it is time to wait. Your scores will not be updated automatically because oftentimes these scores rely on Google rankings and the like which often take days or weeks to crawl a site again. So be patient and check back often. OH, and don’t forget to mark your calendar for another 6 months from now. You’ll want to start this all over again then too.
