Content

It’s no secret that content is number-one when it comes to SEO success. If you get your content right, you’ve created a solid foundation to support all of your other SEO efforts. Ask yourself, are you producing quality content? Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages? Do you offer something of substance to visitors, something useful and that they won’t find elsewhere? These are just some of the questions to ask yourself in assessing whether you’re providing quality content. This is not the place to skimp since it is the cornerstone upon which nearly all other factors depend.

Keywording

The most important SEO factor after creating good content is good keyword research. There are a variety of tools that help you discover the specific ways that people may be searching for your content. You want to create content using those keywords, the actual search terms people are using, so you can produce content that effectively “answers” that query. You should be mindful to use the right language – content too full of technical jargon may cause a search engine to skip or not rank that page highly. For a medical example, a person trying to research treatment options is more likely to search for “depression medication” than “monoamine oxidase inhibitors.”

Local Search

There are two ways that Google ranks your business for local search, relevance and distance. It’s very important that your business information should always be detailed and accurate to maximize your relevancy to new clients. You can’t control how far you are away from a new client, but Google favors relevancy. If your business is more likely to have what a searcher is, Google will rank it higher in local results. If a user doesn’t specify a location, Google will calculate distance based on what’s known about their location.