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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making your company appear as high as possible in search results pages so that people find you and become your customers.

When Google comes to your site to analyze it, it categorizes the words you use and the people who link to you. Your goal is to make sure you know what Google is digesting and that what Google finds is relevant to your customers.

While the tactics of SEO are one plank in a comprehensive marketing plan, the basic strategy of relevancy applies to all aspects of your business. Incorporating this “SEO Thinking” into your business enhances all forms of marketing, customer service, and product development.

Here are five SEO tips to become more visible to your customers with SEO thinking.

SEO Tip #1: Be Relevant

Google’s DNA is relevancy. You know your customers, so give them what they want. The more relevant you are to customers, the more likely you’ll appear high in search results where people can see you.

Relevancy applies not only to website copy, but what you say and do in Social Media and who links to you. It also is the yardstick to measure any other SEO tactics. If JC Penny had used that yardstick, they may not have gotten recently “Google Slapped” for using “Blackhat SEO” Techniques.

SEO Tip #2: Choose Your Words Carefully and Use Them

Choose the words or phrases that describe your business based upon the amount of people who search for them.

Is singular better than plural? Is one word better to describe your product than another? How do you know?

Use the Google Keyword Tool to discover the words and phrases that are both relevant to your business and that drive traffic. (Google “google keyword tool” to find it.) The tool provides the number of searches per month for each keyword you ask it to list.

Start with five words or phrases and use them:
- in your page titles
- on your page
- in links to other pages on your site
- in your URL’s

Use these same words and phrases in all your social media. Be sure to use them in your social media profiles. Many times, a flickr photo or youtube video may appear in the search results before your own website does. Take advantage of that.

Write relevant “description text” to entice people to click on your link.

Repeat.

SEO Tip #3: Make SEO Part of Your Day to Day Marketing Thinking

This idea of using the Google Keyword tool to figure out the better way to say something is easy, quick, and valuable. If you’re writing website copy, a blog post, or captions for a flickr photos, use the Google Keyword tool to find keywords that drive the traffic.

Most writers typically ask themselves, “Is there a better way to say this?” Add to that, “Is there a better way to say this that will drive more traffic?” This simple question, coupled with searching out the answer in the Google Keyword Tool, can mean the difference between being visible or invisible to people looking for you.

This is the real art of seo. Use it to your advantage.

SEO Tip #4: If You’re a New Solution/Category/Idea, Tie Into An Existing Idea

Search engine marketing works because people are searching for you. The marketing conundrum for innovative solutions is that people aren’t looking for you…yet…because they don’t know about you. By definition, innovations are ahead of the curve. What to do?

Tie into an existing trend in the industry. Be topical. People are looking for things that are mentioned in the news. If you’re topical, they’ll find you, too.

For example, if your company has developed Concentrated Solar for the residential market, few people will be looking for you–yet. Instead, write blog posts or marketing copy comparing you to photovoltaics in order to become visible to people looking for the better known technology. Some article titles could be:
- “Concentrated Solar: A Better Photovoltaic?”
- “Go Beyond Photovoltaics with Concentrated Solar.”
- Defense Against Blackouts: Concentrated Solar Provides More Power, Longer Than Photovoltaics.”

SEO Tip #5: Build Links Appropriately

Links to your web pages are the reputation currency of Google. Get other, relevant websites to link to you by:
- creating great content that other people need
- writing articles on well known article websites like Ezinearticles.com
- adding your company into online directories that are relevant to your business or category. You may want to consider paying for inclusion into the Yahoo!, Business.com, or All The Web directories.

Be skeptical of “link exchanges” or companies that will put your links on many different websites. You may sell Concentrated Solar, so a link on a real estate website in Prague may not be relevant. Too many of those links and Google may look at you askance.

How do you get the ball rolling on a new website? Getting one link to your website is all you’ll need for Google to find you. Some people have reported that tweeting your URL will bring Google to your website as well. Once Google discovers you, it will come back regularly as long as it thinks it will find new, relevant information.

So be relevant.

PS: Here’s what I did to drive a little more traffic to this website choosing the right keywords using the Google Keyword Tool
- the terms “seo tip” “seo tips” both have monthly search traffic of 60,500. When I discovered this, I changed the URL to include “seo tips” and added “seo tips to a paragraph. I then changed the simple numbering system to “SEO tip #n”.  I also created a graphic and named it “five-seo-tips.jpg” with alt text “Five SEO Tip for Innovative Startups”.
- “art of seo” drives more traffic than “the art and science of seo” (4,400 searches a month vs. <250), so I added the phrase, but probably not enough to make a real difference.

- I confirmed that “innovative startup” is really long tail and the difference between the singular and plural is negligible.

I was talking to the owner of an engineering design firm recently when I asked him, “Where do most of your leads come from?”

“The web,” he said, “It’s transformed our business.”

Indeed.  He’s been investing in SEO for a number of years because he saw how it drove leads.

A few weeks later, I was at a renewable energy conference walking the tradeshow.  These things are not nearly as glamorous or as exciting as they may seem at a quick glance.  But,  I turned the corner and saw a sign that struck me so much, I had to take a photo of it.

Now, it’s not everyday that you’re looking for a hydroelectric engineering firm.  But if you were, you’d find Sunrise Engineering.  They’re so proud of this fact, that they hilite in their tradeshow booth.

Whether or not it’s easy to dominate your niche, these two datapoints illustrate how search has transformed many different kinds businesses.

Second Life creator Phillip Rosedale is starting a new company, The Love Machine.  It’s a set of collaborative tools for companies to help people work smarter, a typical goal of any workgroup solution.  But what’s different is his fundamental premise, which is summed up in a recent blog post of his: On the End of Offices.

I’ve been following Rosedale since I invited him to speak at an ad agency I use to work at.  We walked around Sixth Street in Austin the night before recording a podcast.  Not just a developer, he had great ideas on how businesses could get the most out of Second Life.  Today, he has great ideas on how to work.  Ideas that have nothing to do with the virutal world and everything to do with the real world.

He and his team don’t have an office.  Like many of us, they work out of coffee, bars, etc. Free wifi is everywhere and there are obvious and not so obvious advantages to not paying rent, especially in San Francisco.  Better use of capital.  Less meetings.  Fun & Inspiring.  Better ability to recall meetings because of how the brain stores information when  you meet in different places.

The Love Machine has made smart SEO choices as well.  As a startup, they need all the advantages they can get to drive traffic and get customers.  By using WordPress as their website’s content management system, they have chosen a free, open source solution that has a robust community of developers improving it every day…and that’s in addition to the core team.

But one of the interesting things they’ve done is how they’ve instituted scrolling in their journal featurewhich is a collaborative timeline visually inspired by Twitter. At first glance, it looked like it could have been created using the SEO killing frameset.  Or, only slightly better, in Flash. However, a quick peak under the hood reveals they’re using a jquery scrolling method.

jquery is an javascript library that ships with WordPress.  Many developers use it create sliders, scrollers, etc.

It works like this:  all the text is in the HTML page, nestled in <div> tags that are easily digestible by search engines.  The CSS and jquery libraries take care of scrolling behind the scenes from the search engine’s point of view.

The Love Machine’s Journal is proof that you can get SEO friendly scrolling with out having to use Flash or, horror, framesets.