SEO INFO

The results of a search engine query can be a very powerful branding signal. 36% of search engine users believe that companies that appear at the top of the search results are the most relevant for the search terms used.

This has strong implications for branding. When somebody searches for your brand name, not being in the #1 position can hurt you.

Unless you have a ton of affiliates trying to outrank you, or very high authority sites (like Amazon) selling your product, ranking at the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs) for your brand name shouldn’t be that difficult.

Here are some tips that you can follow:

• Include your brand name in your domain, next to a generic keyword. For example, if you have a web design company called Praxis, a good domain would be: praxiswebdesign.com.
• Include your brand name in your homepage title.
• Get listed in a couple of good directories using your brand name in the anchor text. I prefer Yahoo! and Business.com. They are not cheap but they’re well worth it.
• Link to your home page from your internal pages, using your brand name as the anchor text. An easy way to do this is to put the link in the page footer or any other area common to all your pages.
• Get other bloggers to add you to their blogroll using your brand name as anchor text.
• Usually, these tips should be enough to secure the #1 spot for most brand names. Our site, Shoestring Branding, was already in the first place in Google after a week, without any inbound links and only by having our brand name in the domain and in the homepage title.

Some experts also recommend to bid for a top position in sponsored listings through pay per click programs like Adwords and Yahoo! search, arguing that having presence in both organic and paid search results reinforces your brand.

Unless your brand is already a household name, or you have many affiliates, the cost of pay per click ads for your brand name should be fairly inexpensive, since the search volume for your brand name is likely to be small.

Once you rank #1 for your brand name, you may want to try to rank well for competitive, highly targeted generic key phrases. This is more difficult and explaining it is outside the scope of this article.

If you’re interested in learning more about search engine optimization (SEO) my friend Aaron can probably teach you everything you need to know.