Growing your business today means growing your social status and gaining a large following. The best way to make this marketing strategy work is to attract more customers through your blog, video posts, and through social networks. Creating good content is an important investment in your business, which serves as your public relations representative. It helps to demonstrate to potential customers your capability to communicate clearly and competently, and also helps to achieve higher search engine rankings.

The key to high quality content for social marketing is the balance between self-promotion and something that is useful for your target audience that enhances their experience. In other words, the content should attract potential customers to your community.

Metadata is information about the data, and Meta tags are information about the webpage.  Meta tags cannot be seen by visitors to your website, but web browsers and search engines use these meta tags in determining different characteristics about the page.  Browsers use meta tags to determine how to display content or reload the page for example, and search engines can gather information such as the page title and description, as well as other web services. Webpages are developed using a language called HTML, and meta tags are located between the open and closing head tags in the HTML page code. Having meta tags is the key stone in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines respond to.  Just simply adding Meta-tags won’t magically raise your website to the top, but it will make your site look relevant to search engines.

Focusing on the particular location in internet searches is vital for many small businesses.  In more than 95% of searches customers are requiring a certain mile radius or zip code. Being on the first page of local search results on Google, Bing, or Yahoo will deliver high-value customers to your business.

Search engines all choose results based on prominence, relevance, and proximity. The results are then organized by paid ads, places, and organic results. Developing a solid Local Search Optimization plan is critical to be successful in today's competitive online search results business.

To have any chance to get to the first page of Google, you have to find the right balance between SEO-friendly content and human readability. Since search keywords are one of the most important aspects of SEO, you have to analyze what are the best keywords for your business before you even start to write any content. Brainstorm different words and phrases you think people are looking for, and use trusted tools such as Google AdWords (link) to help select the best keywords to use. Also important is to consider how much competition there is for each keyword or phrase, to determine if you have any reasonable chance to rank for that keyword. It might be better to find niche keywords where you can rank high, rather than focus on highly used keywords where you’ll end up at the back of the pack.  Work to find the right balance.

Search engine like Google work on the bases of sorting through millions of pages that match the keywords search for, and then return the most relevant results first.  So how does Google determine the most relevant results?  One of the ways is the algorithm that matches the keywords searched for to the quality and frequency of the content of your site.  In other words, the content of your site is one of the basic criteria in search engine ranking.  There are of course additional criteria that I will cover in upcoming posts, but let’s start with the basics of good content.