SEO Services Leading To Success

Anyone who tells you that search engine optimisation is easy really doesn't know enough about it. It requires knowledge and understanding in all key areas of website making including design, development, copywriting, marketing and business.

When working for large companies, a search engine optimiser must collaborate effectively with team members to achieve campaign success. This involves a lot of patience, transparency and dedication to roll things forward, because you often may need to rely on others. Changes might need to be made to the design or coding;  the copywriter might need to rewrite content in order to include a balanced usage of researched keywords and it often starts with managing client expectations, in order for them to reconsider “bad” SEO practices.

The entire process can be quite time consuming, needing ongoing research, analysis and implementation, but if done correctly, the rewards will definitely be worth the effort. Main reason being, unlike the Pay Per Click model where clients have to pay the search engines every time a user clicks through to their site, Search Engine Optimisation can be achieved without losing a penny!

To visually represent this SEO process, I was inspired by Matt McGee’s ‘SEO Success Pyramid’ and redesigned my own simpler version.

Short explanation of the different elements from left to right, bottom up:

Patience

• As discussed before, patience with others to complete tasks so SEOs can push on, clients to respond to enquiries and most importantly, seeing overall SEO results which can take minimum of two months.

 

Strategy Development

• Entails working out the level of competition to evaluate how much effort needs to be put in.
• Defining overall business objectives to tailor website development and marketing strategies accordingly.

 

Quality Product and Services

• It’s not just about displaying a pretty website enticing consumers with catchy wording. If you want your business to stay around long term, coupled with a continual revenue stream, you have to deliver quality products or services to your customers so they will want to come back again and again.

 

Resources

• Unless a Search Engine Optimiser possess multiple skills, most likely he/she will need other team member’s support. Excellent communication and people skills are needed to drive enthusiasm, hence, build a strong teamwork environment.

 

Dedication

• Sometimes SEO can be very frustrating - search engines constantly changing their algorithm making results unpredictable, confusing – endless information online and offline material, stressful – keeping up to date with current technologies. So a real passion for the IT industry and online marketing is a must to succeed in the field.

 

Reporting

• Reporting which includes keyword rankings and analytics needs to be automatically generated to measure SEO campaign progress. “Measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage (Web Analytics)."

 

Keyword Research

• Keyword selection can make or break your SEO campaign. Imagine targeting the keyword phrase “soft drink” in the U.S. over their more popular used term, “pop”. If your online business primarily sells soft drinks in America, you will lose a significant amount of traffic and potential customers because you’ve targeted the wrong keyword.

 

Usability

• Quoted by Aaron Wall in his ‘Search Engine Optimization Book (2005),’ “most websites have miserable usability … it is one of the most neglected aspects of web design.” Basically if you have trouble navigating through a website and a clear action path cannot be found, it means bad usability.

 

Software

• SEOs can save a lot of time and money by utilising the right software and tools.

 

Content

• Always take into consideration that your website should be designed to serve both search engines and users. Include balanced usage of keyword phrases for bots to pick up but concentrate more on creating quality content for visitors.

 

Accessibility

• To support making the online world a better place, websites should be Section 508 Compliant so disabled users can also access the same information.
• Needs to be crawlable for search engine spiders to index pages.

 

Linkage

• To increase your rankings in search engines, you need to increase quality incoming links to your web pages using relevant keyword-rich anchor text. As well as properly structuring internal linkage to support user experience and adding the ‘no-follow’ attribute to specific pages can help contain PageRank flow.

 

Findability

• What’s the point of having a fantastic website when no one can find it? Using a range of online and offline strategies make sure you create multiple channels for users to locate your site with minimal effort.

 

Branding

• Brand building can take  years to develop and will survive for the long run if it stands behind strong morals, ethics, integrity and authenticity. The Internet makes it easy for users to post negative comments about your business and word of mouth can spread like wild fire so maintaining a positive reputation is crucial.

 

Trust

• Gaining trust from visitors is probably the most difficult to achieve because it can easily be broken. Once established, the process of converting a visitor into a customer will be quick and effortless.