Let’s say your company’s Web site has been in place for five years. Traffic is decent, but you have a strong suspicion that you’re missing opportunities. When you search on terms related to your products and services, your Web site rarely shows up on page one of the search engine results. Frustratingly, several competitors whose domains are younger than yours are performing better than you in organic search rankings. How are they doing it?  Relatives that work for Google?  A killer pay-per-click campaign?  Proficiency in black magic?!?

First of all, knowing someone who works for Google is nice, but in no way could that affect rankings. Search engines run on highly complicated, frequently-changing, automated algorithms not affected by casual, behind-the-scenes human tinkering.

Secondly, paid search might affect organic ranking, albeit indirectly. Increased traffic can be a signal to search engines that a site’s popularity is increasing, which could ultimately result in higher organic rankings. Again, this is an indirect way to get search engine attention and could be extremely expensive. And finally, as for black magic…

Do we really have to answer that? 

Search engines love new content. The more new content you put on your site, the more frequently it will be crawled by search engine “spiders.” The more your site is crawled, the higher it will rise in the results.

So if you haven’t already done so, develop a content strategy, both onsite and offsite. We recommend the following steps:

1. Research your competitors’ sites: When you search on relevant key phrases, review the sites that appear on page one search engine results. Note the type of content that is specifically indexed for that key phrase (e.g., landing page, article, video, customer review) How big is the competitor’s site? Quantity matters. When it comes to ranking, larger sites typically reign. Quality also matters—well-written content that helps users solve problems, answer questions and spark ideas will naturally attract more views.

2. Keyword Research: Knowing what key phrases your prospects are typing into search engines is critical. Invest the time and effort in keyword research to see which phrases people are using to search (and their many variations).

3. Onsite content: Make sure to have at least some keyword-rich content on all important pages of your Web site. Start with the most important, then move on to secondary, tertiary and so on. Keyword-rich page titles and Meta tags should also be in place. But don’t stop there: Continue to add new content in the form of blog posts, articles, news releases, user-generated content (e.g., customer reviews or host a community for people interested in your products/services), and even videos tagged with your keywords.

4. Offsite content: Once you have your onsite content strategy up and running, direct your attention to your offsite content strategy. Establish yourself as a subject-matter expert by writing articles on a variety of topics that will be of interest to your target audience. Incorporate keywords into the articles along with links back to the most relevant pages on your Web site. Look for opportunities to create Wikipedia pages and Squidoo lenses. News release distribution is also a valuable offsite initiative. Finally, get involved with the online community by participating on social networking sites and commenting on popular blogs related to your company’s products and services.

5. Develop a timeline: Set a deadline for completing optimization of existing Web site pages then create a calendar for adding new content. To ensure that deadlines are met, identify a specific employee or a team of people to share the responsibility for content development. Establish a clearly-defined process for content creation, approval and posting to the site.

If you haven’t developed your 2010 content strategy, it’s not too late. If you’re not sure how to go about executing any of the above steps, seek expert help. Also remember that just like traditional marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process. Launch your strategy, stay the course, and eventually, your company will reap the results. If you haven’t optimized your site content yet, contact us to find out more about search engine optimization with Rosetta.