During the first session this morning in eTail West’s Search Summit, Ash Buckles, SEO Manager for InterContinental Hotels Group, walked attendees through several important sustainable SEO strategies. According to Ash, the current keys to SEO are accessibility through search engines, relevance through content, and authority through links, social shares and relationships.

For each category above, Ash shared some tips meant to help further any organization’s SEO initiatives, as well as streamline departmental communication to keep SEO essential within any corporate team:

Accessibility Tip #1 Audit redirects across all domains and URL’s: Identify which pages are active and which are not, or are possibly re-directing customers to somewhere else on your website

Accessibility Tip #2 Recapture links through server error clean up: Make sure your customers aren’t being sent to pages with 404 error messages

Accessibility Tip #3 Publish pages with semantic markup: fill your active pages with semantic data that helps search engines point customers to important data on your website

Accessibility Tip #4 Ensure search engines can index your pages: Are your pages really as accessible as you believe to search engine robots?

Relevance Tip #1 Roadmap your content: Rather than putting up empty content for the sake of driving traffic, make sure there is a method to what content your consumers are being linked to

Relevance Tip #2 Write unique content: Make your content standout to consumers that are looking for what you are trying to sell them

Relevance Tip #3 Know whom you are targeting: use the correct language and content to target your specific audience

Authority Tip #1 Be worthy of your authoritative position: This involves making sure you are following the above tips first

Authority Tip #2 Amplify organic content: it is important to push your content through paid and social means, which involves bringing marketing, social, IT and SEO teams together

Using the above 9 tips himself, Ash has managed to ingrain the importance of SEO within the corporate structure of InterContinental thus revolutionizing the way SEO is implemented in order to drive a higher volume of web traffic to IHG’s active content pages.