For businesses looking to get ahead in the digital age, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important component of any successful marketing campaign. A good SEO strategy begins with the identification of keywords and phrases that are specifically tied to core products and services sold by the company. Those keywords are then refined and intelligently placed to shape the contents of the company website and the way other websites on the Internet link to it.

Changing the contents of a company website is the easiest way to control keyword placement. Effective SEO campaigns place keywords in the website title and heading (H1) tags. For regular page text, relevant keywords should be placed within the starting paragraphs near the top of the page. ALT tags should be used to provide search engines a keyword based description of each image. Finally, content is king! Search engines love fresh content and reward frequently posted news and relevant articles to a company blog.

While website contents are important, what happens away from the site is even more important. Keyword based links to a website from external pages that are regarded as authority websites count higher than any other factor. Since these pages are often outside of direct influence, they are more difficult to control and the generation of quality links for SEO can be time consuming. The goal of SEO link building is to convince as many high quality pages as possible to link to a target site, and several months can be spent building quality links. It helps considerably when SEO is being done for a business that produces quality products or services, as other website owners are quicker to link to companies they trust and respect.

At the end of the day, good SEO campaigns result in increased sales. Websites that rank high in search results, such as page one for important industry keywords, will realize increased traffic and visitors. This extra traffic results in fresh leads and interested customers. There are a good number of affordable SEO firms in Phoenix offering SEO and online marketing services to help local businesses compete.