Carolina Rustica CEO Spills SEO Secrets

E-mail campaigns
E-mails can help your SEO efforts by generating interest and traffic to your site. Websites that deluge new customers with e-mails day after day, however, face diminishing returns and higher opt-out rates.

We send out e-mails to our 30,000 contacts when we have something interesting or unique to offer—about once a month. Our click-through rate is higher as a result, and this further helps with SEO. We use Vertical Response for our e-mail service.

Blogs
Blogging is one of the easiest ways to generate content for your site, and you control it 100%. With a blog, you can create your own third-party site that points to your main site.

You should focus on topics that are important to your site’s visibility, but also add content that is a little more daring or personal than what you may have on your Website. I try to write at least an article a week for our blog. We use Google’s free Blogger, which makes it easy to add content.

You can also promote your Website through other people’s blogs that are relevant to your industry. Try exchanging articles or using a sweepstakes for blog readers, which is always appreciated. While search engines frown upon paid links, creating useful and relevant links on other blogs to original content on your site is a great way to increase your site’s visibility.

Affiliate programs 
We are just beginning to explore affiliate programs, but I believe they can help your site’s SEO endeavors by the propagation of coupon sites that use affiliate networks to provide coupon content.

Two of the largest coupon sites, Retailmenot.com and CouponMountain.com, don’t rely on affiliates, but there is a host of others that do—and more are appearing every month. Coupon sites provide inbound links to your site, but you need to determine you can afford the cost of the affiliate programs and the decreased profit margin generated by coupons. 

Social networking
If you sell products or services targeted towards Gen Y, Z or beyond, social networking via youth-oriented sites like Facebook is an extremely cost-effective pursuit. Twitter, which everyone seems to be using, can also give your site increased exposure by links to your company blog and updates (tweets) on genuinely newsworthy events. Other more targeted social networking platforms such as LinkedIn provide exposure to more technically oriented communities.

Social networking sites are built primarily on user-generated content (UGC), however, and this may be out of your control to moderate. We have found YouTube to be a great platform for our business, since our furniture and lighting lends itself to a more visual presentation.

Wikis
Pioneered by Wikipedia, wikis are sites that provide non-commercial, non-promotional content—just the facts. I can say with certainty that wikis cannot hurt, particularly if you are trying to make some clarification about your business or Website.

But wikis may not be the best avenue unless you have a compelling, unique story to tell. If you have customers or suppliers who want to tell your story for you on wikis, however, they can become a good source of inbound content.

SEO is a long-term endeavor. My list, while not exclusive, provides useful ways to build your site’s visibility.

The relevance of your site is determined primarily by others, so your SEO efforts should be directed at getting other Websites to link to you. You should also be using third-party platforms and services to enhance your overall visibility and measure your success.

Richard Sexton is president/CEO of furniture and home decor merchant Carolina Rustica.