Friday, January 1, 2010
Today marks the start of a new year, and decade. It is hard to believe the dot-com bubble burst a decade ago. One thing that hasn’t changed over the last 10 years is the need to develop a strategy to take your business online.
The famous dot-com downfall taught us many lessons, one of the most important being that without a strategy to help your business be “found” online, it is hard to succeed. With a multitude of sites competing in your company’s niche, it can be virtually impossible to garner quality leads without a strategy in place—especially online.
The good news is there are a myriad of online marketing channels available to businesses. One cost-effective area of focus within online marketing is organic search engine optimization (SEO).
What is SEO and why should your company invest in this channel as part of your marketing mix?
SEO is the process used to improve the volume and/or quality of traffic driven to a website from search engines, specifically the left column results, which are called organic or natural search results. SEO professionals consider how search engines work, what people search for, and how they search. This knowledge is used to increase website traffic and conversions by gaining higher placement, ideally first page placement, within the search results for a particular keyword or keyword set. The goal, like any marketing or advertising effort, is to garner a larger visibility for your organization’s information, products or services. This visibility will ideally result in a searcher visiting your website, which provides the searcher the content they seek. This provides an opportunity for the creation of a traceable sales lead, a potential sales conversion and contributes to reaching your organization’s business goals.
SEO is often focused on the mechanics of how sites are optimized. Optimizing a website involves dozens of factors based on a search engine’s search algorithm. Each search engine (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) has a unique algorithm, or formula that determines what data available on the Web is considered most valuable for a particular search. Ideally, SEO is integrated with the initial design and development of your website. For those with an existing site, it is essential to start the process with a comprehensive analysis of your current website, your organization and your company goals.
The analysis of your business’s website may include review of site structure, navigation, keyword research, page content, page and link errors and much more. Not only do code and site architecture affect the way websites are crawled (i.e. visited and indexed by “bots” that collect the data used by the search algorithms), domain name and web server configuration can also impact the interaction and classification of the site. Analysis is an essential component for any SEO campaign because search engines crawl, index and sort websites and their content.
To go into a more granular level of organic optimization, SEO can be broken into on-page and off-page. On-page optimization includes the application of keyword research to improve elements of your website to include site or page content, META data (e.g. titles, descriptions), markup (e.g. bold, italics), and text links. Search algorithms now include a consideration of the websites connected to your site as part of how they place your listings within search results. Off-page optimization has many strategies in and of itself, however, is usually begun with link building. Link building is the process and creation of quality inbound (to your site) and outbound (to other sites) links—preferably from/to sites that have related content. Even better if these sites have high traffic, why many organizations are so interested in linking to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
As with all marketing initiatives, it is critical to determine goals for your campaign. Your goals may include website traffic increase, a higher rank within the search engines for specific keywords, new links each month and/or a return on investment (ROI) for the program. The more specific your goals, the more often they produce quality ROI. However, please note, ROI can be particularly difficult to track without proper techniques and tools in place.
SEO is ever-changing and a time consuming process to learn. It is as much alchemy as it is a science and requires experimentation just as all marketing channels do. It may be in your business’s best interest to find a firm to develop and execute a strategy based on your particular needs. When selecting a company to help you, find one that forms a partnership with you and is willing to educate you. Additionally, this company should analyze your current efforts and develop a comprehensive and ethical strategy.
Remember, the ultimate goal of SEO is to increase the value of your website’s content, which in turn ranks your site higher within the search engines. By ranking higher, your site can garner more traffic, produce better quality leads and improve online marketing performance while helping to meet your business’s overall marketing goals. SEO is an essential part of any online marketing mix and doesn’t require a media buy.
Brandy Woolford is an Internet consultant at SteadyRain. A graduate of Saint Louis University, her diverse communications background has included work in primetime news, public relations, media relations and online marketing. www.SteadyRain.com or brandyw@steadyrain.com.
Comments
SDouglas (anonymous) says...
What I've learned the most is the age of the site, continuous content tweaking, and writing to my potential customer and not what I want to tell the customer.
February 4, 2010 at 6:16 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )