HuffPost SEO Lessons for Solution Marketing

– By Steve Robins

More Learnings from The Huffington Post

Continued from The Solution Marketing Blog: Is Your SEO Worth $315 Million?

Let’s take a look at the Huffington Post’s SEO strategy as described by the NY Times, and see how it applies to solution marketing:

1. Provide value. First and foremost, write content that provides value to your readers.
2. Use keywords – within reason. Make sure that you do include relevant keywords in the top few paragraphs of a page or article.  Don’t pack in too many keywords or your content will be hard to understand – which won’t help anyone.
3. Use catchy and descriptive headlines to get attention where appropriate. Not everything can be catchy, but good headlines will draw readers.  Rather than a headline like “Portable Sprocket Solution,” consider a more descriptive title like “Sprocket Solution Provide Anywhere, Anytime Access.”  Think about how your solution uniquely addresses customer pain points.
4. Let readers share links on social media. The page’s SEO will increase as people link to it via Twitter, Facebook and other social media.
5. Tag it! Include a list of hyperlinked keywords (tags) that users click to see related information on your site.  You could list these keywords at the bottom of the page.  For example, a company that offered a “business intelligence” solution for “healthcare” would use those keywords and tags.  
6. Link, link, link. Always include links to other pages on your site.  While internal, these links still increase the destination page’s rank.
7. Picture it. Include photos and images, tag them and watch the images show up on Google search – with links back to the page of course. 
8. Polling. You could even include a poll on various pages to draw readers in, and then share that poll on social media as HuffPost does.

Additional Reading

The Solution Marketing Blog: Is Your SEO Worth $315 Million?
NY Times – Web Words That Lure the Readers
NY Times – Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets
Chitika Insights: The Value of Google Result Positioning
The Solution Marketing Blog – Improve Your Social Media Skills at IMU
The Solution Marketing Blog: Where The Prospects Are