Welcome back to the final part in our series on Web Marketing Basics. 

The hottest ingredient in web marketing these days is search engine optimization. SEO is what you do to rank the highest on a Google search. SEO is a big and complicated beast and many business owners are, understandably, completely overwhelmed by it. Whether you wrangle the beast yourself, or you hire someone to do it for you, its important to 

4. Come up with an SEO strategy. 

There are 3 areas that we focus on. 

The first is technology. 
A site that is built using clean, modern HTML is essential and Google will rank sites that have this higher. Also, galleries and slide-shows should be SEO friendly. Google does not recognize flash, so if your site uses this you’d want to look into replacing it. Lastly, your site’s performance, or the speed in which it loads, is a factor. If you have enough time to refill your coffee while your site is loading, its too slow. 

The second is content.
Google will look at text and keywords, and how they’re integrated throughout your site. Spend some time researching your keywords and use them in your content, preferably toward the top of your pages. Meta tags and page titles should include your keywords. Also, sites that are frequently updated rank higher.


The third is link ecosystem.
Your network of incoming links and reviews is both the hardest and the most important aspect of your SEO efforts, and requires ongoing attention. Asking your clients to review you (only good reviews will really benefit you) on sites like Yelp, or asking your colleagues in related businesses to link to your site (either from their own site or from their blog) can be very helpful in terms of your ranking. Google weighs incoming links that are true and seemingly related to your business heavily. 


No one can truly guarantee that they can get your business to the top of search engines. However, many SEO experts will make this claim and cost the business owner many thousands of dollars to do this. Keep in mind that honest, legitimate SEO takes time to see results and its an ongoing process.