Take a Step Back with a Quick SEO/SEM Checklist

I'm a big believer in "taking a step back" once in a while to look at your SEO or SEM efforts. Its easy to get lost in all the details of day to day business survival- here is a short list of "basics" that you might want to check off to make sure you're headed in the right direction. 

-  Remember, its not all about getting tons of traffic.  As an Axandra post stresses --

Many webmasters try to get as many visitors as possible. They join traffic exchange programs and they optimize their web pages for keywords that have very many searches.
Unfortunately, getting as much traffic as possible is not the right strategy for a successful website. Traffic that doesn't convert is useless traffic. If your website has thousands of visitors but only a few sales then you have done something wrong.

-  How are your social-media efforts going? This may be one of the things that get swept under the rug, but making sure that you are tapping into the right social media tool/s can be powerful if used right and often. According to Lee Odden for Online Marketing Blog's post on SEO Tops Recession Internet Marketing Tactics, a poll they conducted with over 400 business marketers showed both not-so-surprising and surprising results. SEO, Blogging and Pay per click were the top three (in that order), with the surprise being that "Corporate Website" receiving only 7% of the vote.  But overall he made a comment that he suspects that "if "social media" had been presented as a single category, it would have garnered the top spot since social media tactics involve 5 of the top ten." 

- Are you keeping abreast of the latest in SEO or SEM? I know its hard to keep up with things that are changing everyday/every hour -- what you might miss out on are opportunities to save you time, or increase the effectiveness of your SEO/SEM strategy. Here are a couple of  recent "news" items to get you started --

- Yahoo adds Zip Code Ad Targeting 

- Convert your existing links on your site to "higher quality" links for free.  Matt Cutts explains how in Free Links to Your Site. By using Google's webmaster portal you get to see who is linking to your 404 (unfound) pages. and if you want, either reactivate the page or send them a new link with the active link.