Since the economic downturn, many B2B wholesale suppliers have been operating with limited resources. Therefore, they must allocate marketing dollars to the most successful and cost-effective online marketing tactics. While Search Engine Optimization is such a tactic, SEO techniques are changing rapidly and many companies haven’t kept up with the latest changes. That’s why we want to review the latest SEO techniques, providing you with information for gaining better rankings along with more traffic and conversions.
MarketingSherpa’s 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report shows that 93 percent of the B2B organizations surveyed (n= 935) indicated SEO is highly effective and yields high-quality leads. Below is a partial list of the top rated SEO techniques used by B2B marketers:
• Keyword research
• On-page content optimization
• Title tag optimization
• Meta description tag optimization
• Develop new SEO-friendly content
• Link building
If you have any doubt of the value of top organic rankings, let’s go over a couple of classic search engine stats and a recent stat about online sales. These stats tell you that most people use search engines when buying online, that online sales are continually on the rise, and that SEO is an important marketing tactic for increasing sales.
• Over 80 percent of users who made an online purchase began with a keyword search (comScore 2004).
• Studies show that 70 percent of all search engine clicks occur on organic rather than sponsored links on the same search results page (Enquiro 2005).
• Online retail spending reached a record $43.4 billion in Q4 2010, up 11 percent from the same period in 2009, and increasing for five consecutive quarters during a recessionary year (comScore 2010).
The remainder of this article will provide tips for the following SEO techniques: keyword research, on-page content optimization, title tag optimization, meta description tag optimization, new SEO-friendly content development and link building.
Keyword Research
Keyword research should be the first step of your SEO campaign because it tells you what keywords your customers are using to find your site and products. From this data, you can develop keyword lists for optimizing your web page content and for use in your paid search campaigns. There are several places you can look to find your most relevant keywords.
• Mine your site log files for converting keywords and for frequently used keywords.
• Use your site search to see what products your visitors are looking for.
• Use competitive intelligence tools to discover what keywords work on competitor sites.
• Use keyword suggestion tools. The Google AdWords Suggestion Tool is a good source because Google gets the largest number of users searching on its site.
It’s important to research keywords because it’s impossible to second guess at what words customers will use to find your products because they search from a different mindset than you or your staff. Note that long-tail keywords are valuable and can create more traffic than highly-competitive keywords.
On-Page Content Optimization
When you optimize your content, you get higher rankings. To begin, ensure that your keywords appear in your title tag, description tags, headers and the body of your pages, as well as in anchor text to inner pages. Then you want to conduct a proper linking campaign to get incoming links from authoritative sites. It’s also important to create new content regularly. When you add new, relevant content to your site, this invites the search bots to visit more often, which increases your site’s relevance and importance.
Create content with a purpose for each page on topics of interest to your customers. Focus on two or three keywords per page, including the keywords in the beginning, middle and end of the page. Support your primary keywords with related keywords to establish context for search spiders.
Write in a conversational style and include a call to action when appropriate. Focus on customer needs while writing concise copy because people tend to scan web pages in a flash. That’s where your headers work to organize your copy and inform readers what to expect. Use bullets and bold text for emphasis and to make the page easy to scan. Don’t use long paragraphs, and leave plenty of white space. Use keyword anchor text for internal and external linking and vary your anchor text by using related keywords.
Don’t overuse your keywords because that can lead to a penalty. You should place your most important keywords at the top of the page and then use throughout the page as long as your keywords help create user-friendly copy. I don’t need to remind you to avoid keyword stuffing or using keywords in invisible text. Hopefully, that’s a thing of the past.
It’s also important to use images on your site to illustrate your products. Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names and ALT tags to optimize your images, ensuring that you accurately describe the image file.
Title Tag Optimization
Your title tag should be about 65 characters in length and should form a sentence beginning with your most important keywords. Since the title is the first thing users see in search results pages, use good marketing copy that is both persuasive and descriptive. Be sure to create a unique title tag for each page.
Meta Description Tag Optimization
Your meta tags consist of the description tag and keywords tag. The description tag is used by search engines to further describe your site after the title. Therefore, you want to use compelling copy that will encourage clicks. Place your keywords as close to the beginning of the tag as possible and remember that the character limit is 150 characters. If you go over that, the remaining text will be cut off, which is harmless as long as you cover the most important information at the beginning of the tag.
The keywords tag is no longer used by most search engines to determine rankings; however, some engines still use it so you can’t lose by adding a keywords tag to your source code within the header area. By inserting this meta tag, you can provide search engines with information about your site that is not visible on the page itself.
New SEO-Friendly Content Development
One reason for creating new content regularly is to invite search bots to crawl your site more often, which increases site relevance and importance. But the most important reason for adding new content is to engage your customers and keep them coming back to your site for information as well as for sourcing products.
No one is interested in a dull website with stale information. You need high-quality content that is relevant and current. One way to do this is to create a blog or a news page where you can post industry news and information of interest to your customers. This might be a schedule of all the trade shows in your niche, or it could be how-to articles on sourcing, importing, exporting and the like. Use your blog to find out what content your customers appreciate. Then follow the tips above regarding on page content optimization and meta tags when creating your new content.
Link Building
Link popularity is an off-page ranking factor used in search algorithms. It refers to the quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance of an incoming link. Quality is more important than quantity and refers to the site authority of the incoming links. Google PageRank is used to determine a site’s quality based on its inbound links.
Anchor text is the clickable part of a content link. The keywords in your anchor text give the link more weight and semantic value. It’s important to link to relevant content on other pages that are thematically relevant to the anchor text. If your link has the anchor text “wholesale wallets,” it should link to a page about wallets.
Link building is more complex than ever as links become harder to come by. And if you buy links, you risk getting penalized. However, there are many ways to get links with social media tactics. First, you might start by getting links from quality directories in your niche. Whenever you write content for your site or others, tweet the URL and post the URL on social media sites like digg.com, reddit or stumbleupon. Share it on your Facebook page. Answer questions on Quora and Yahoo Answers, referring back to a relevant link on your site.
Another tack is to solicit links. Start by searching your primary keywords on Google to identify your competitors. Then, research to find out what sites are linking to them, creating a list of webmasters to approach. Be prepared to offer something of value in return for an incoming link with relevant anchor text.
Another way to get links is through your blog. Post valuable information people will pass around and link to (link bait). Visit other blogs in your niche and post valuable information with a relevant link to your site. Write articles in your area of expertise and submit to well-known publications in your niche or post on your blog. You can also use optimized videos for gaining links.
In other words, link building involves getting a large number of links from quality pages using keyword-rich anchor text that goes to a thematically related page. Building link popularity is a time-consuming but necessary job that always takes longer than you’d like. You can gain link popularity faster with an in-house linking team or by subcontracting the job to a link specialist.
Last, but not least, you’ll want to create a Sitemap of all the pages in your site to reveal link structure. This helps search spiders find all relevant pages of your site available for crawling. And you’ll want to ensure your pages are indexable and that the links can be followed by using the free W3C Markup Validation Service. In summary, you need well-optimized content and an abundance of quality inbound links to get higher rankings and increased traffic and conversions. Following the tips in this mini guide to SEO will help you move up in the SERPs.
source:toptenwholesale
