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Search engine optimization and you

BY ERIC MCMULLEN

The internet is an ocean without a floor. With its continued growth comes great marketing opportunity. Search engine optimization, or SEO as it is most commonly referred, is the art of staging your website in such a way that makes it more likely to be found at the top of page one in a search. Not to be confused with search engine marketing, which would include paying for increased traffic, SEO is a free art form and a necessity for all public entities.

Images

A picture speaks a thousand words. To please the Google gods, every image on your website should have a relevant name, specific alt tag, compressed file size, and a link to more content. Having names and alt tags on images are the first thing search engines look for when cataloging your website. Compressed file sizes make your website load faster, and links provide credibility and user experience. Search engines use all of these factors to determine your search rank and will help you climb to the top of the charts.

Content

Content is king. This can mean inventory descriptions, landing pages, blogs, and much more. Your content should tell the story of your culture, have engaging topics, and be something that people are searching for. There are many tools to determine which topics and keywords are most heavily searched in your area and it all begins with a Google search. It starts slow but the return grows exponentially. Don’t forget the images!

Search Engine Directories

With Google at the top, there are hundreds of search engine directories a consumer might use to stumble upon your business. Yahoo, Ask.com, Cycle Trader, Yelp, and Facebook all qualify for this category. It is important to claim your business on as many platforms as possible and ensure that the information listed there is accurate.

Search engine intelligence is constantly improving. Every day search engines get better at determining which results are most relevant for an internet user’s searches. These three tips only scratch the surface of SEO but they are the first place to start if you want to maximizing your findability potential. SEO practice can be painstakingly time consuming but watching your page views grow will help you decide its worth. Happy Googling from Team Winnebagoland!

Eric McMullen is the marketing coordinator at Team Winnebagoland, a premium midwest dealer, where he manages all marketing efforts for powersports and marine. With backgrounds in marketing, media production, and automotive, Eric brings an exciting twist to powersports and is redefining the industry with groundbreaking digital marketing techniques.

One Comment

  1. Great article, but not only is it important for the SEO crawlers, but also for visitors who may have trouble reading. The alt attribute is used by “screen reader” software so that a person who is listening to the content of a webpage (for instance, a person who is blind or may have Dyslexia) can interact with this element.

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