Inc. Magazine’s 2014 Grow Your Company Conference had a wide variety of speakers, discussions and workshops focusing on topics right out of the Inc. Magazine Table of Contents – Launch, Lead, Innovate, Build.
Though each discussion throughout the conference was relevant, useful and interesting, one in particular struck a chord with our team members across departments: Search + Social: The Future of Your Business.
Leading the conversation were four accomplished individuals with equally impressive, yet distinct, backgrounds.
- Duane Forrester – Senior Product Manager – Webmaster Outreach at Bing – @duaneforrester
- Bruce Clay – President of Bruce Clay Inc. – @bruceclayinc
- Maisha Walker – Pres. of Message Medium & Contributing Editor for Inc. Mag. – @maishawalker
- Manny Rivas III – Online Advertising Director for aimClear- @mannyrivas
The panel focused on five key areas that must be executed correctly to move your company forward in the digital space and upward in search engine rankings.
- Content
- Social Media
- Usability
- Link Building
- SEO
It may seem counter-intuitive that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not the first consideration when trying to promote your company, product or service through search engine ranking. In years past, this was not the case. But long gone are the archaic tactics of keyword stuffing, hidden content through CSS and meaningless backlinks harvested in the underworld of the web.
The algorithms that search engines use to index web pages have become so much more advanced. Now, they not only take into consideration content on the page, but the manner in which it is written. This improvement has taken the power away from webmasters and placed it entirely in the users’ hands.
If you tailor your site to optimize the User Experience and provide relevant, useful content, the search engine will reward you with a high-quality relevancy score. And the higher the relevancy score, the higher rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Search Engine Relevancy Score Factors:
- Be the subject matter expert
- Write compelling Page Titles that convey the page’s purpose / content
- Deliver the content the user expects
- Make the user’s search query visible/conspicuous in the page content
- Content Quality > Content Quantity (at least 250 words per page is recommended)
- Direct the user to the right content & messaging given where they are in their search process
- Don’t be the “content middleman”. Search Engines want to remove stepping stones, deliver the final step content to rank well
If you need to improve your web content for better SEO, we do that.
