4 Quick Tips to Do More with Your Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO) take up a lot of time for most businesses, whether they like it or not. Building links, social profiles, and expanding content to attract the attention of both readers and search engines forms the bulk of that activity, but there's plenty more to learn for business owners with the patience and interest. There are many ways to reach the rankings you want to see and not all of them are fully explored by other businesses, which gives you an opportunity to test them out and gain some ground on the competition.

4 Quick Tips to Improve Your Search Engine Marketing

Here are four areas that are often overlooked but can quickly add to your current search engine strategy: 1. Link internally: You probably have a link strategy to connect with other sites, but what about linking within your own page? Passing "Google Juice" from popular pages to less visited spaces on your site is achieved by building those links, making a review of your internal link structure high on the list of next steps to take with your SEM. 2. Bring back broken links: Again, building exciting new links to exciting new sites is, well, the most exciting and prioritized area of SEO for most marketers. But that can overshadow an easier path of nurturing the links you've already gained and making sure they stay where they are. Spend some time checking for external sites that are linking to dead pages or those you've improved with more popular content. You can then bring back  URLs from the dead or contact webmasters to redirect visitors, perhaps even recommending new links in the process. 3. Go beyond Google: Google obviously dominates search - it has around 68% of the U.S. market (comScore) and even more than that in European markets - but that's still a sizable chunk of traffic that you could work on winning from other engines. Integrate Bing and Yahoo into the same processes and checks you use to track Google and make sure you use the tools offered by those platforms to optimize your pages for their users. After all, those searchers still have an interest and money to spend, and you want to win their business regardless of how they find you. 4. Optimize your images: Many sites miss out on image tagging, descriptions, and other simple administrative steps that lend themselves to visual search. The search process is a little different but visitors can nonetheless find your site via image searches and the practice is growing thanks to social networks like Pinterest becoming popular. Visuals are an increasingly important part of website design, so you might as well make the most of their search potential as you go about sprucing up your site.   After you work on these quick tips there are hundreds of other areas that you can test to see what works for search terms relevant to your business. The overall goal is to dig a little deeper and look more broadly at the world of search engine marketing than others in your industry. Take more time to work out what moves the needle in your niche and eventually your business will be staring down on competitors from the top of the digital pile! What ideas have you employed to get ahead? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.