Not too long ago, the use of the term SEO met with blank stares. Those whose eyes did not glaze over asked what the initials meant and received the answer that the letters stand for Search Engine Optimization—[bq1] which led to further blank stares or questions.

That is no longer the case. In fact, most people on the web now know that to get attention for their business or enterprise, they need to move up to the first page when someone searches for their type of business. As a Los Angeles automobile accident lawyer, I want my firm to appear at the top of all searches. To do this, I need to optimize my site so it appears at the top of the rankings. But figuring out the way to appear on the first page is not as simple as creating a great website.

Some things that you can do to help with SEO for your site

The web is a vast place filled with millions of people vying for the attention of potential clients. By now everyone knows that most people on the web have short attention spans. So how do you attract and keep their interest?

Some things that help with getting noticed include the following:

Your layout. There are tons of boring places on the web. You need yours to be more than informative. You need it to be attractive to the type of customer you want. Colors and design matter. Pictures and video are arresting.

Use headlines and subheadings. Readers on the net often skim a page. Reading an article or page on the net is not much different from reading a newspaper in the sense that it is the headline that draws you in. The ones that catch your attention lead to reading more. Sub-headings are also important. They break up a page and allow the eye to move downward point by point.

Be honest. Tell the truth about your company and the products or services you offer.  And most important of all, provide valuable content.

A skilled firm can provide the aggressive representation you need for your accident claim

The Larry H. Parker team of attorneys has a record of success in 91 percent of cases, and we will fight for you! We have offices in Long Beach, Riverside, Los Angeles, Fresno, and Bakersfield, California and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

Do you use bookmarklets to streamline your SEO activities? If not, you might want to give them a try. These amazingly useful tools are small bits of javascript code that you bookmark and then run by clicking the bookmark. They can save you time, as well as help you avoid the frustration of trying to remember how to perform a task.

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In “Some Nifty SEO Bookmarklets To Make You More Efficient,” Tom Critchlow covers some of his favorite SEO bookmarklets. Two very useful (and not just for SEO) bookmarklets include:

• Site Search: Pre-fills the search command to search the site you’re on in the Google search box
• Google Cache: Go to the cached version of the page you’re on

If you use Open Site Explorer (OSE) to check on your site’s (and your competitors’) link profile, get to the tool you want quickly with:

• OSE of the homepage of the site you’re visiting
• OSE of the specific page you’re on
• OSE top pages for the domain you’re visiting

Find out more about the site you’re on with Google insights or grab MajesticSEO data for the domain you’re browsing.

If you like to keep on top of what’s trending on Twitter, try this Topsy bookmarklet to find tweets about the site you’re on. Or, if you’re on a Twitter profile and want to find the person’s other social activities, click this bookmarklet to find connected social sites.

Critchlow’s post includes a dozen (or so) more bookmarklets you might find useful for SEO. Try a few and see what you think. You might just wonder how you ever got along without them.

Do you use images on your website? Do you optimize them? If not, you might be missing out on a surprising amount of traffic. People really do search images looking for the product or information they need. Seriously. Google wouldn’t keep a separate image search if there wasn’t a demand for it, would they?

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On the other hand, a little test run by Kasy Allen and described in Is Optimizing Photos More Important Than You Think? suggests that even unoptimized photos can rank in image search if the rest of the page is well-optimized. So is it worth optimizing your photos? Yes. Because in the same test, even slightly optimized images on optimized pages ranked highest. By optimizing both, you can increase rankings in both web search and image search, boosting your odds of being found.

You’re doing SEO anyway (right?), so you might as well optimize all of the elements on the page.

For photos themselves:

• Use main keywords in the image name.
• Use a keyword-rich descriptor as the alt text. Do not simply use the image filename.
• Host images on-site. An exception would be an image-heavy site that is trying to speed up page load times. In this case, you might try picking one or two smaller images per page to host on-site and optimize for.

For the rest of the page:

• Use a page title that mirrors your image name.
• Write an engaging description of the page content.
• Use title tags that mirror your image name and page title.
• Get inbound links with appropriate anchor text.

If you’re not currently optimizing photos, do your own test. Do an image search for your keywords and note where your images rank. Then try implementing these tips and search again in a few weeks. Are you ranking better?

If you’ve been doing search engine optimization (SEO) for any length of time, you understand just how important keyword research and selection are to your online presence. But do you also realize that your keyword phrases should be three words or more? People have learned to be more specific in their searches, so businesses need to choose keywords with that in mind.

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Search volume

Search volume is still important, but keyword selection is no longer just about volume and ranking. And that’s good news for small businesses, who can’t compete effectively for the broad keywords with the highest search volume.

High-volume traffic that doesn’t convert is useless to you. Less traffic, at least from people ready to buy, can be much more valuable. One way to get this targeted traffic is with long-tail keywords, those phrases that are at least three words long.

The long tail

Searchers have come to understand that long-tail phrases are more likely to turn up relevant results and are using them more often. You can see this trend in the most recent data from StatOwl, showing that more than half of searchers use keyword phrases of three or four words. Only about 11 percent of searchers use one- or two-word phrases.

The people using the longer phrases are also more ready to convert, because they know what they’re looking for. Add to that the ability to rank higher for these terms because there is less competition for them, and you have a winning formula for increased conversions and sales.

Ryan Woolley goes into more detail on this topic in “Successful SEO Tactics: Keyword Selection.” But the key takeaway is that you can grow your business by targeting the most specific phrases that describe your products and services, instead of worrying about the head terms with the highest traffic numbers.

Similar to Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog primarily has a great function of finding out the statuses of the links on your site.

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This helps in uncovering 404 issues that need to be redirected. This tool makes it easy to go through your site and fix any broken links that may not be passing seo value. Also helps you differentiate between the internal/external links that are follow/nofollow. Other features include being able to check for duplicate page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, H1, H2, images, and canonical. Down side of this tool it does not have a search Crl+F function.

Good SEO takes a lot of work, but it’s worth it because it’s such a vital part of all your marketing efforts; from organic search to paid search, content marketing and more. Even better, SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so you can recycle your SEO efforts in one area to improve results in another.

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One of these areas is a type of advertising called retargeting. This involves using display networks to show certain banner ads to people who have previously visited your website or taken some other specific action on the web. Prequalifying your audience in this way helps you increase conversions by sending messages that closely match visitor’s intent.

In Leveraging your SEO for Search Retargeting, Joanna Lord of SEOmoz talks specifically about search retargeting, which targets users who have searched for your brand or keywords. She offers three ideas for recycling the information you gather from SEO analysis to improve your ads and search retargeting results.

Mine keyword ranking reports: You most likely have some keywords you’d love to rank well for, but your other SEO efforts have yet to pay off. Use these words in your network ads, and target people who have recently searched on them.

Dig deeper into your keyword research: No, don’t do more keyword research. Make better use of the research you’ve already done. If you have a group of keywords you think could be valuable but they aren’t a priority in your organic SEO efforts, use them in a search retargeting campaign instead.

Comb through competitive research: Evaluate both paid and organic efforts from your competitors. Use search retargeting in the areas where you’re lacking.

It only makes sense to wring every advantage you can from the hard work you put into your SEO efforts. Search retargeting helps you do just that.