There is no such thing as a single, correct way in which to conduct an SEO campaign. Every SEO consultant, agency or in-house marketing team will have their own unique approach to the important stages in the process and, most of the time, these differing approaches are valid and effective. However, there are some unscrupulous SEO companies that continue to flout recognised best practice, utilizing “black hat” techniques and often causing more harm to their clients’ web properties than good. In order to be certain that you have the right SEO provider, it’s important to ask questions about their style and approach. My own SEO philosophy has developed from over five year’s experience delivering efficient and ethical campaigns. The important areas are, in my opinion, as follows:
Keyword Research
A clearly defined keyword (or key-phrase) strategy is absolutely crucial. New internet start-up businesses should pay close attention to this stage of the process before commissioning a website to be produced. Many people make the mistake of organising a website to be designed thinking that the optimisation of the site comes at a later stage. It’s important to consider your keywords right from the start as your website should be built with these in mind.
Site Architecture
A good SEO consultant should be able to advise you on the best approach for building a search friendly website. Issues such as site navigation schemes and URL structures can play a crucial part in enabling search engine spiders to index your site correctly. Design technologies such as CSS, Flash and Javascript can also present indexing issues so, again, an essential component of good SEO is ensuring that the technology is correct right from the start.
Site Audit and Competitor Research
Website owners with existing web properties that they’re looking to improve should expect a detailed site audit from their chosen SEO provider. The key areas include:
* Analysis of site architecture & internal linking
* Current rankings in the search engines
* Analysis of current indexed pages
* Duplicate content check
* URL structure & canonicalization
* Analysis of page mark-up and tags
* Page copy & content analysis
* Page Rank analysis
* Analysis of current in-bound links
A thorough site audit should be presented together with a competitor research report. This report should present a comparison between your website and your top competitors, looking at ranking factors such as domain age, Page Rank and in-bound links. This report should present a realistic perspective on the timeframes and probabilities for securing a page one result on your chosen keywords. If your current website is brand new, has no in-bound links and little content then you are not going to be able to acheive a page one result for a keyword such as “morgages” anytime soon (well, not without A LOT of financial investment!) Your SEO provider should be upfront about this and should advise you on a realistic strategy.
Content is King
The old cliché “content is king” is absolutely true and an especially important consideration in web development. Websites that are little more than holding pages will never rank well in the search engines beyond, perhaps, searches for the precise domain or website name. Search engines love content and better still, new content. It’s therefore important to put in place a strategy for building the volume of pages on your site and, in doing so, presenting genuinely useful and original content. The aim with any content marketing strategy should be to make your site the authoritative voice on your subject. So, if you run a landscaping business, for example, you should consider adding as much advice, news, gardening tips and examples of your work as possible. Over time, the consistent development of new content will help you to gain trust with the search engines as an authority on your subject which in turn will lead to natural in-bound links and better rankings.
Dynamic over Static Content
SEO is an on-going endeavour. As a result, websites need to be live, interactive and engaging. Web properties that engage with the principles of Web 2.0 are far more likely to succeed on the SEO front than those that don’t. This is because search engines like dynamic content such as blogs, news-feeds and social media engagement. A site that is regularly updated with useful content (where that content is made freely and easily available to share) will perform better than a site composed of static “info” pages that never change or engage with the wider web.
Optimise for the User not the Search Engines
In my opinion, SEO ought to be renamed SEUO after “search engine user optimisation”. Many people make the mistake of optimising their sites specifically for the search engines whilst considering the search engine user who discovers their site a secondary or subordinate issue. This approach is fundamentally wrong and defies the reason why search engines exist. The purpose of a search engine is to deliver the most relevant and useful content to a user. If your site content is optimised well for the search engines but is of a poor quality, this will eventually be detected. Google, for example, can identify user behaviour and bounce rates for specific sites and pages. If your site has a high bounce rate with users rarely exploring the content on your site beyond the landing page they arrive at, this will eventually be detected and will likely result in lower rankings. Similarly, any link-building endeavours should be engaged with the user in mind. Links from thematically unrelated sites to your site do not assist web users in their search for specific content. So, again, the user must be the centre of all optimisation activity.
Engaging Tags and On-Page Optimisation
Most people are aware that META tag information is an important element of SEO. Whilst this remains true, many people are unaware that the way in which these elements are optimised can affect issues such as CTR (Click Through Rate) and bounce rate (the volume of people who click off from your site without exploring it beyond the landing page). So, a cleverly optimised site will not only include your target keywords within the META tags but it will also provide useful, relevant and engaging hints to the search user about your content. If this is done correctly and if your landing page content is of high quality then your CTR rate will be higher and, respectively, your bounce rate will be lower.
Any on-page optimisation work needs to be carried out using professional SEO software. Using guess work to optimise your site will likely get you nowhere. Many SEO professionals use privately developed software, however there are a number of excellent tools available to purchase. Some of the market leading SEO software providers include: iBusinessPromoter (IBP) and SEO PowerSuite. These tools will help you to identify crucial on-page factors that require optimisation such as keyword density and page mark-up elements.
User Focused Link-Building Strategies
It’s well documented in the SEO community that the days of purchasing volume links to boost your site to the top of the engines are over. SEO providers who continue to make the claim that they can acheive fast results, cheaply through volume links should be treated with extreme caution. Just as it is with other elements of the SEO process, modern link-building strategies should focus on the user and the content. When sourcing links for your site consideration needs to be given to the value a potential link has for a user searching the net. If a user browses a website offering details of cheaper car insurance but s/he discovers that the site links out to websites offering cut-price washing machines, the chances are this site will not be favoured by the user. Links need to connect related information together otherwise they are of little value. Finding relevant link opportunities is a dull, tedious and time consuming task however, again, many SEO software providers offer tools to make this process more efficient. This software will also help you to analyse link value data quickly in order to avoid pursuing links that are of little value.
Another approach that I would recommend is to place a lot of emphasis on your content. Providing genuinely useful content that can’t be found elsewhere on the web is almost a guaranteed way to generate natural looking links that won’t get flagged up for looking “SPAM” like to the search engines. However, this is best supported by an element of viral marketing (for example, emailing a link out to all your contacts telling people to take a look at the useful content you’ve posted). Genuinely good content will then get forwarded on, posted on blogs, social media sites and third party websites.
Another strategy is to create content which is then hosted on third party sites or blogs. This method allows you greater control to dictate the anchor text used for your links (i.e. your target keywords). The key to this tactic is to, again, create great content (this is a theme running through my SEO philosophy!) Good quality content hosted on thematically relevant third party sites, with links embedded in the middle of that content using anchor text related to your keyword strategy, will definately help you to improve your rankings! However, caution needs to be taken not to duplicate the same content over hundreds of hosting sites. Equally important, the anchor text used must vary from site to site. 300 links to your site all using exactly the same anchor text (”cheaper car insurance”, for example) won’t look natural to the search engines. Links need to be unique, measured and user-focused. The quality of the links and the hosting sites is far more important than the volume of links.
Summary
I think this is the briefest overview I can give about my SEO philosophy! There are many advanced SEO techniques that I will attempt to write about in future posts. Just to summarise very quickly then:
* Use keyword research & competitor research as a basis for new campaigns
* Don’t consider SEO as an afterthought
* Expect a comprehensive audit & analysis from your SEO provider
* Be realistic with your campaign objectives
* Make great content central to your web development strategy
* Make your site a leading, authority site
* Dynamic, interactive and engaging sites over static sites
* Optimise your site for the user not the search engines
* Always use professional SEO software
* On-page optimisation should again be user focused
* Link-building work should again be user focused
Follow these pointers and you should acheive page one results on Google. SEO is, however, a time consuming activity. If you’re considering outsourcing any element, I can provide a competitive quote. For further details on this and search engine marketing generally, visit my contact page.