12. Search Engine Optimization

What's going y'all? This weeks topic is Search Engine Optimization. Last summer while interning at Sonesta Collection: Hotels, Resorts, and Cruises I compiled and analyzed metrics using Omniture and Google Analytics. I also made SEO strategy sheets for each hotel with a focus on Organic Strategy (title tags, keyword phrases, meta description) and Pay Per Click strategy (keywords, ad copy). This post will try to help you get a better understanding of SEO and how to improve your site's visibility.

First, I want to give a definition for people who don't know what SEO is. This is the definition from Clickz.com: The process of making a site and its content highly relevant for both search engines and searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

Here are some basic steps on how to improve your SEO (if you want even more detail about this check out this clickz article). I would start off by defining your goals so that you can see if your SEO has been successful or not using an analytics tool. Next, I would research your competition's websites and see what websites they use. This is huge because if your goal is to take traffic that your competition would get for the same word and have that traffic redirected to your website. However, you need to be aware of the keywords that the competition has paid for because if you start using those keywords then you can yourself into some legal trouble. Another important aspect of SEO is making sure your title tags on every page on your site are unique and include the keywords that you want to target because this one of the most important ways to get your Google rank up thus creating more page views. After you have done these steps, I recommend you review your analytics tool to see how you are doing compared to your goals and then make adjustments accordingly.

In the end, proper SEO is the most important way for your website to increase its visibility and gain a prominent position in various searches.

Hope you enjoyed this week's post...The Bossssss is out. Happy Easter everyone!