In my last post I talked about creating content.  Step one of inbound marketing strategy is getting found online.  Getting found involves 3 elements, creating content, optimizing the content and promoting the content.  Today I’m covering optimizing the content.

This is a step in the process that can also quickly overwhelm those who haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of the Internet.  There are several facets to it.  Optimizing your content means making it easy for the search engines to find it and serve it up to people who are looking for it online.  On the face of it that sounds pretty simple.  The trouble is there are a finite number of keywords and a finite amount of space available on the front page of search engine results pages (SERP). Everyone cannot be there.  You will be competing for a position on these pages.  This puts search engines, Google being the predominant one, in a position of having a lot of control of your success or failure in getting traffic to your online content.  Google has patented methods for determining which sites rise to the top positions and understanding how they rank sites is limited by the information Google is willing to share.

I strongly encourage you to read a little more deeply into this topic.  Having a strong understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) can go far both in helping you develop your specific plans for going forward and save you from wasting money and time in outsourcing this part of the operation.  A lot goes into optimizing a website and/or blog to help you rank higher for the keywords you selected earlier in the process.  Having a clear understanding of what keywords make the most sense, present the best opportunity for success and match your business model is important since it will factor into nearly everything you do online going forward.

Basically, you will want the content you create to be optimized for the same keywords in everything you post online.  Why?  More content on your site related to this set of keywords conveys the message to the search engine that your site is focused on this topic and therefore has the greatest likelihood of providing the most comprehensive information on the topic.  A word of caution here, it isn’t just about slinging keywords onto the page in question.  Google has gotten very sophisticated in evaluating webpages and the days of merely loading the page with a paragraph or so of a rambling string of keywords are long gone.  These practices can land your site at the back of a very long line as punishment.

What does it mean for a site to be optimized?  It means your content should be useful and follow logical order for the human readers but it should also be arranged with search engines in mind.  The page title, headings and content should contain relevant keywords as often as possible.  Another easily overlooked place for optimizing content is in the images your site is using.  Google cannot read what is in the images, only the file name, and alternate text so it is important to consider this when naming the photos used on your site.  Make sure you take the extra step of including alternate text.  Alternate text is what is displayed when the image doesn’t load on the page for some reason and also gives the search engine information about what is presented in the photo.

The elements I’ve mentioned so far are on page factors.  You will also need off page factors and these appear to be carrying more weight these days.  Off page SEO involves building backlinks to your site, that is having other sites linking to your content for the relevant keywords.  In addition to volume of backlinks, the quality of those sites linking back to your content are also examined by Google. The old methods of link farms and trading links isn’t as effective these days.  Basically, Google wants to rank sites well that have valuable content that is well organized and easy to find.  Doing all you can to meet that burden is the best way to get things happening in a natural way.

There isn’t time or room here to cover the vast subtleties of SEO.  Most of us will have to outsource this step.  Before you run out and hire someone to help you I cannot impress upon you enough the need for you to have at least a basic understanding of what it is and the best practices.  Not the most exciting topic in the world to read and study about for sure but  a little extra effort on your part here can carry you a very long way toward later success.

What if you find you are in a business that is highly competitive for the keywords that suit it best?  This is where social media can enter the picture in a big way.  If you find overtaking competition on Google to be unlikely, too expensive or outside your grasp for any reason, you can focus your efforts instead on building an online community using your network and building out from there using Social Media tools.  We’ll cover this step later since you will use it to promote your content whether you are in a postion to compete in the search engines or not.

I mentioned in an earlier post one of the differences between websites and blogs is that Google tends to like blogs more than websites.  The way Google lets us know it likes something is by how it ranks it.  It tends to be easier to rank well for your chosen keywords using a blog than a website.  Most believe this is because blogs are much more dynamic with content being updated more often and that content is likely to contain the relevant keywords if you do a good job at thinking ahead on what your site will be about and those keywords fit the natural flow of things.  If you have both, I encourage you to have the blog housed on the same domain as your website so all the relevant keyword traffic is going to the same place, everything working together to build a solid foundation.

Don’t take the selection of keywords lightly.  Seek professional guidance or spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of SEO at this early stage in the process.  Future efforts will provide much more profitable results.  Realizing later you did a poor job of picking out the keywords will be a disappointing experience. Remember, this is not going to be a fast and overnight process but it is one that builds continuously the next step relying on the foundation set in place by the previous one.  Doing a good, thorough job in these early stages gives you a strong foundation for the future.

Next we’ll move to a discussion of promoting the content you create and this will get to some particulars about using Social Media as part of the recipe in building an Inbound Marketing strategy.