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35 B. Leader 20 (2010-2011)
Out of the Shadows: Boosting Your Bar's Visibility with Search Engine Optimization

handle is hein.journals/barlead35 and id is 44 raw text is: Out of the shadows: Boosting your bar's visibility with search engine optimization Say you want your bar to be more vis- ible online to members, potential mem- bers, the public, or all three. Where do you start:Twitter? Facebook? Linkedln? Those and other social media sites could be great for your bar, said Rich Brooks, president of Web design, In- ternet marketing, and consulting firm Flyte New Media. But you should also consider something called search en- gine optimization, or SEO. Why is it so important to make sure your website ranks high in the results users see when they search via Google, Yahoo, and other search engines? A full 80 to 90 percent of Internet sessions include use of a search engine, Brooks told attendees at the National Associa- tion of Bar Executives Communica- tions Section Workshop in Portland, Maine, this past October. You want to be the needle that cannot be missed in that giant haystack. -Rich Brooks Whether it's a member, potential member, member of the public, or other constituent who is looking for information or services you offer, if you can learn to think the way Google thinks, Brooks said, you can be the needle that cannot be missed in that giant haystack. SEO doesn't have to be about find- ing ways to fool the system and thereby improve your ranking. Brooks called that black hat SEO. Besides being dishonest, those tricks can backfire; they work great until suddenly they don't, he said. Google sometimes seems to mete out punishments, he added, sending cheaters plummeting down into the depths of the search results page when their black hat techniques are discovered. Brooks much prefers white hat SEO, which involves knowing what people search for, and then tweaking the content of your website to help ensure that it will show up toward the top of the results page for that search. It takes some work, but white hat SEO is a lot more sustainable, Brooks not- ed, because you're not at risk of dis- covering that your loophole has been closed-and possibly that you've been found out and punished. An integrated approach SEO is an important component of what should be an integrated approach to Web marketing, Brooks believes. This integrated approach has the fol- lowing four phases, he explained: 1. Attraction. This refers to how you get people to visit your website in the first place.You can attract visitors through a blog, a page on a social media site, through SEO, with press releases, through word of mouth, or by some other means. 2. Retention. This is how you keep your members or other visitors in- terested and engaged. Some ways you can do this include e-mail mar- keting, ongoing use of social media, and encouraging people to sub- scribe to your blog's RSS feed. 3. Conversion. This is the phase where you help your visitors move closer to whatever action you want them to take-joining, renewing, buying something, etc. 4. Measurement. In this phase, you assess how well you've been doing with the previous phases. For exam- ple, you might use Google analyt- ics, which can give you such helpful data as where your Web visitors live, how they find your site, and how long they spend there. Another important piece of your overall Web marketing plan, Brooks said, is having a clear content strategy, so you're not posting or sending infor- mation that is of little interest or value. You have to know where your cus- tomers' pain points are, Brooks said, explaining that the first step in devel- oping your strategy is to find out what's important to your members or other constituents-including any problems you can help them solve. The next step, he added, is to deter- mine where your customers would like to have a conversation with you. Are they heavy Web users? Do they fre- quent one or two of the social media platforms more often than the others? From their standpoint and yours, what are some effective ways to reach them? Keywords are key One of the best ways to climb up the search results ranks, Brooks said, is through careful use of keywords. Each page of your website is considered sep- arately by search engines, he pointed out, so it's important to make sure you have keywords on every page rather than just on the home page. It's also very important to have a unique, keyword-rich tide tag for each page, Brooks noted, explaining that the tide tag is the text that will ap- pear in the box at the very top of your visitor's Web browser when he or she navigates to a particular page. Many 20 Bar Leader/Winter 2011

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