Call it what you like, but getting more people to buy from you, contact you, subscribe to your website, phone/email you - this is the goal of SEO.
But what exactly is SEO? Many business owners see it shrouded in mystery and painfully difficult to get a really clear understanding of what it involves.
Is it real or just a gimmick? Are there real, tangible gains to be realised from spending money on SEO? This question is probably the most important - what bang do I get for my buck and what is reasonable to pay for this type service?
To understand SEO and why it might be important, an appreciation of how search engines work may be benefical.
How does a search engine determine what website comes 1st, 2nd 3rd..etc on their Search Engine Results Page’s? Have you ever really thought about this? Ever questioned the accuracy of the results? Think your website should in position 1 and not position 21?
Search engines use a number of different factors when determining how relevant a website is for a particular keyword. When they are determining this relevancy they take into account three main areas:
* Website Architecture
* Website Content
* Website Popularity
Let’s take each area in isolation.
1. Website Architecture
When analysed against the W3C standards, does a website implement good clean code and more importantly is it easy for a search engine’s spider to crawl a website? What about navigation on the website? Are relevant pages easy to find or are they buried beneath a complicated hierarchy..e.g.
www.mycompany.com/folder1/folder2/page.html
2. Website Content
Simple this one. Does a website have the searched for keyword on a given page? This is simplistic but it’s the foundation of all Information Retrieval IR search systems. There are a number of additional factors that are looked at here, but keywords, visible on a page is the starting point.
3. How many and what type of websites link to yours and (more importantly) what keywords do they use to link to you? Unlike the first two areas, this is very difficult to control and it’s why SEO can be so difficult.
Let’s get down to specifics. You have a website that has 250 pages. You have a set of keywords; let’s say 50, that you want to rank well for. Your target country is the UK. You have not implemented any Search Engine Optimisation before (at least not deliberately).
Where do you start and what would it cost?
Let’s go with the premise that you are going to pick 25 pages and use them to target your top 50 keywords. Here’s the step by step approach (you may take) to optimising your website:
1. Initial analysis of your existing website to find out what are the chief areas of concern
2. keyword research and analysis to define top 50 keywords
3. Analysis of competitors for chosen 50 keywords
4. Analysis of traditional competitors
5. Research current visibility for chosen keywords - what is the base line?
6. Backlink Analysis - What keywords are people using to describe your website?
7. Backlink Analysis - Where are you getting links (links - not traffic) from - what countries, what domains?
We are now ready to start making changes on the website - we have all the research complete, know what the base line is and what the campaign goals are.
8. Clean up code if required, i.e. clean html, CSS, broken links, navigation
9. Get human readable urls that match chosen keywords (ensure 301 redirects are implemented when changes made to page names)
10. Setup appropriate robots.txt tile
11. Write Meta data for 50 keywords - title tag, description tag, keywords tag, image tags - let’s say we target 25 pages for the 50 keywords, 2 keywords per page
12. Generate or optimise existing sitemap, plus develop xml sitemap and upload to Google Webmasters. Setup the geo targetting option in Google webmasters.
13. Optimise or generate new content for 25 pages, e.g heading tags, bolded text, paragraphs, appropriate bullets, correct font colours and background, i.e. black against white (accessibility concerns), calls to action..etc
14. Implement internal and external links that align with keywords
15. Setup a customised 404 error page
16. Append a blog to the website, Wordpress, Typepad, Drupal..etc
At this stage we have covered a lot of the ‘on page’ SEO stuff, i.e. the areas we can control. Next is the difficult part, ‘off page’ optimisation…
17. From my existing links, see are there any that can be leveraged, i.e. one’s where I can easily change the link text to better reflect one of my chosen keywords
18. From the competitor analysis above, start looking at the links my keyword and traditional competitors have. Pick a bunch every week and start emailing them to ask for links.
19. Start writing appropriate blog posts relevant to my industry and keyword rich. Good blog posts act as a magnet for new links.
20. For more advanced link/brand awareness building I’d start to look at online press releases and
21. Social media optimisation techniques.
So, how much would you expect to pay for this work? £100 per month? £500 per month , £1000 per month?
Ultimately the price paid should be based on the expected ROI from the campaign. As a website owner I’d be looking at the expected return in terms of traffic and ultimately new customers from the website.
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