Seven Tips for Optimizing Content for Search

Tuesday’s SpeakerBox event, entitled “Got Content? Get Government Customers,” was a jam-packed workshop describing the intersection of public relations, social media, content marketing and search.

Blog posts on all the sessions will be coming soon. I’ll be describing the session led by Elizabeth Shea of SpeakerBox and Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo.

1. According to Elizabeth and Janet, it all starts with keywords. A company’s website keywords should be reinforced in all content.

2. Quality inbound links are the most important ranking factor for Google. A great source for these links is content that is published on other sites. As Janet says, “Treat links like PR efforts. If you’d want press there, you’d want a link from there too.”

3. Blogs are a magnet for search engines, because search engines love frequently updated content. Make sure you’re hosting the blog on your own domain - and promote it like crazy. Interested in more tips to optimize your blog for search engines?

4. Look for opportunities to post articles and whitepapers written by your company on quality content aggregation sites or whitepaper directories (such as ZDNet’s free service)

5. Use images and videos to maximize SEO by using keywords in image titles, tags, anchor text and surrounding page text.

6. Janet reminded us not to forget Twitter. Twitter is important, not just for the traffic that it drives to Web sites but because MS Bing has launched a Twitter search site and Google will add this capability in the next few months.

7. Finally Elizabeth reminded us all that content is defined broadly and also includes items like blog comments and surveys. Content can also be a key contributor to inbound marketing strategies.

If you missed the workshop, the full presentation is available on SlideShare.

Hope to see you at the next SpeakerBox event.

-- Katie Hanusik

Photo Caption: Lisa Dezzutti, Market Connections; Janet Driscoll Miller, Search Mojo; Elizabeth Shea, SpeakerBox; Stephanie Stadler Wonderlick, SpeakerBox and Julia Lim, Wonderlick