Inbound marketing, attracting people organically to your blog rather than blasting out ads, seems to be the future of marketing. Traditional advertising just costs too much and potential customers are are too overloaded with information to pay attention anyway.

Search Engine Optimization is essentially free and customers are highly targeted so it is unlikely there will be any other more cost-effective way to market your business.  There are no shortages of SEO experts and gurus out to help you optimize your site, but do you really need to hire someone?

I am not an expert but the more I study about SEO and social marketing, the more I realize that it isn’t all that complicated. It is an ongoing process with every blog post you add so it makes a lot more sense to do this work in house.

Here is some advice that I recently received from the Hubspot newsletter,

Here’s the Shortest Tutorial Ever on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Put keywords in Page Titles.
Put keywords in Page URLs.
Put keywords in Meta Data. (Page Description and Keywords)
Put keywords in your H1 text.
Use keywords in page content.

That is some pretty basic advice that I am sure a consultant would be happy to do for you for several hundred or thousands of dollars per month. Or you could just make sure that all your posts follow this basic advice as you write them. Just those simple steps will have a huge impact on your traffic.

Another key factor is the links on your site. Incoming links are very important because they signify how much others value your content. Actively seek out links, but it is probably better to focus on writing great content that other sites will want to link to. I get about ten link requests a week on my sites, asking me to link to them inexchange for a link back.I’m sorry but that is not how it works. I link to great sites, not just the ones with a difficult to find reciprocal links page.

Don’t overlook outgoing links either. Descriptive links that include your keywords will help Google know what your site is about. Don’t just use “click here” types of links. Those are useless.

Hubspot is one the best sources for inbound marketing information. I highly recommend them if you are interested in getting more traffic to your sites.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.