Search engine optimization (SEO) has become the Holy Grail of digital marketing. The concept has become this elusive, business-saving prospect that requires a quest of Arthurian proportion. Or is it?
Before going any further, I must disclose that I am NOT any kind of SEO genius/guru/ninja/blackbelt. I can’t talk meta tags, anchor text or mouseketeertags. But I too once suffered from making SEO harder than it is.
Can it really be as simple as just putting relevant keywords in prominent places on your Web site or press release or blog? Pretty much.
It helps to think of SEO as glue that makes you sticky. If you are not sticky, there is nothing for the “spiders” and “webcrawlers” to cling to when someone types a query into a search engine. And when we talk queries, we’re not talking about a query from someone who knows your business and what you do. We’re talking a query like, “plumbers and San Antonio.” Someone knows what they want, they just don’t know who can do it for them.
The same applies for optimized press releases. You want people who put that stuff on their Web sites to find your release regardless if they know it’s coming or not. So the words that identify you — your company name, key executives, your type of business — need to be prominent in that release. You also need to add art, bullets and hyperlinks. That’s just more “glue” that gives those crawlers something to cling to.
NEVER (our opinion) write your release to keywords. That’s not to say that you don’t use relevant keywords. But don’t try to trick it up with synonyms that supposedly make you “stand out.” So if you’re releasing the results from a “survey of small businesses” don’t call it an “examination of petite endeavors.”
