Search Engine Optimization

Last month, I interviewed a USU graduate student named Rain Christensen for a story I was writing for the Huntsman Post. Rain started and runs banktruth.org, a website that evaluates banks and provides detailed information about them. After a great deal of sacrifice and hard work, the website has become a remarkable success. During the interview, he typed “best banks” into Google, and his website was the second result to come up out of nearly 300 million.

A lot of our discussion centered around search engine optimization (SEO). Phrases like “best banks” and “bank rankings” are typed into search engines thousands of times per day, and most people don’t look beyond the first set of results. Having your website appear in the top three is like owning beachfront property.

Rain told me there are three things that Google and other search engines look for when they rank websites:

1.     Contain quality content

2.     Updated frequently

3.    Engage social interaction

All three of Rain’s suggestions for better SEO performance were mentioned in an article on forbes.com by Eric Savitz. Savitz also says internet marketers should watch out for trending keywords, create sub-topic landing pages and properly tag and categorize content.

In addition to all of this, there is one other thing that drives SEO performance: blogging.  Savitz quotes Hubspot Director of Brand and Buzz Marta Kagan as saying that companies that blog get 55 percent more traffic. Kagan explains why this is in a blog post called “12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know.” Savitz summarizes it by saying, “the more you blog, the more pages Google has to index, and the more inbound links you’re likely to have.”

As web use continues to shift over to smart phones, people will be even less likely to see what search results lay beyond the first page. SEO ought to be one of the main focuses of every marketer. It is a relatively new field, and so I am excited to see what innovations lie in the future.