Featured Blogger Today: Gretchen Bruno, 341 Principal, Managing Partner

Say your company already has a top-notch Web site, there’s not a single dust particle on your twitter account, your blog and Facebook pages are updated, you posted informative tutorials on YouTube, and you found prospective connections on LinkedIn. That’s wonderful, but how are people searching online supposed to find you? In a word: keywords. Keywords are an essential tool for SEO, or search engine optimization. Associating specific keywords or phrases with your social media sites increases their chances of ranking at the top of the list during an online search.

Here are 5 tips for making sure your sites don’t get sent to the back of the line:

1. Resources: Digital Tracker and Google Keyword will help you narrow down which keywords are best suited for identifying your sites. For better results, incorporate keywords into the headers and footers of each Web page and be sure to name each page.
2. Do Your Research: A lack of well-chosen keywords will prevent your sites from being found when consumers are browsing online. Use keywords that describe your products and services, and also make your company unique.
3. Be Specific: The more specific your keywords are, the better. For example, “book” is a very weak keyword to tag, whereas, “camping first-aid handbook” is more specific.
4. Balance: Resist the urge to place keywords in every sentence. Doing so will signal the search engine moderators. Even if your site does make it past the guards and is placed at the top of the results list, the content will have been compromised to accommodate the overload of keywords, which could hurt your reputation.
5. Social-Butterfly Effect: In addition to associating keywords with your company’s social media sites “inline linking” – or linking your blog, twitter, and/or Facebook accounts to other people’s accounts and vice versa – is a great way to boost your company’s search ranking.