4 SEO Tips for CEOs and Executives

Face it. 95% of software and services out there in the E-commerce space isn’t needed or a complete knock-off with little to no value-add. One of my biggest pet peeves as a client is the attempt to be snowed by vendors who try to pull the wool over my eyes with the buzz words, industry trend driven scare tactics or whatever vaporware they’re pushing just because they think you have deep pockets. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone has a job to do, and some of the best people in the industry are the vendors I deal with on a day to day basis. They are the source of a ton of valuable information and guidance in many situations.

However, over the last two or three years I’ve been inundated with goofballs from one end of the country to the other who are experts in SEO and search engine marketing. Because of the buzz and the $400 per share price of GOOG these days, everyone’s on the bandwagon in some form or fashion. Either as high-priced SEO consultants, or some firm that will help you manage your campaigns – for a price.

Truth is, even the largest of enterprise organizations don’t need much firepower to manage natural SEO effectively. A content editor worth their salt, an analytics package and Excel worksheet can do the trick in most cases.

If you’re an upper-level manager or executive that is responsible for the P&L of your SEO campaigns, but is somewhat disconnected from the details, take heart. This post is for you. You don’t need to read a 400 page book to talk the talk. Plus, in most cases you don’t need high-priced software or consultants to improve search results for your firm. Here’s the skinny:

1. Content is key (not king): Remember, Google and all the rest are here to drive relevant search results for it’s users. End of story. If your firm is optimizing and generating new content on a regular basis based on key terms you’ve identified, that’s half the battle. If your stuff is relevant to real people, it will be relevant to search engines. No tricks needed.

2. Title tags are more important than you think: Find the key words you want to optimize for and put them in your Web site’s title tag. If you don’t know what this is, it’s the verbiage at the very top of the browser. Search engines love this stuff. Put your key terms in there with not too many ‘and’, ‘the’, or other non-descriptive words. If you don’t know how to do it. Get a Web person to take the time to do it for you. Basic stuff that really works. Plus, get the name of your company out of the title as well. Unless people are specifically searching for your firm, this is wasted space. At the very least, move this information to the end of the title, after your key words. Really.

3. Optimize the heck out of your site description and the first couple of sentences on your home page: Why? As this information is indexed by the engines, it will be a clear and concise description of your company and what it does. Remember, real people use search engines. If your site is clear, consise and descriptive in a sea of search results – you win.

4. Make sure the information you’re creating in the above 3 examples is unique for every page of your site. Title tags, page descriptions and inter-page content that is updated often will push your rankings higher than all the other pieces combined.

One final note – there’s some tricks to managing your SEO once things are up and running. I’ll probably be posting about that at a later date. But the important thing here is, if you’re an executive and needing to know the ins and outs of this little cottage industry without looking like an idiot, it’s pretty simple. If it makes sense for real searchers, do it. There’s no real tricks to this.

A great read on the subject that should take you about an hour to digest is from IttyBiz. After reading a couple telephone book sized manuals on the subject and having hands-on experience managing large enterprise accounts, I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on the subject. But, she was able to summize the whole exercise into about 50 pages. Great stuff, and well worth a read.

I really just skimmed the surface here. As I said, I’ll probably dive in a bit deeper on natural search engine optimiation management and reporting in the next few weeks. But, if you’ve got a couple of tips on your own, or would like me to go into further detail, i’d love to talk.