by: Patrick Wagner
Myths abound about the value of search engine optimization, fondly referred to as SEO by Internet aficionados. SEO is the ‘it’ word of e-marketing gurus. Still, most of what people ‘know’ about SEO is way off target. It’s time to straighten things out.
The first thing you need to know about SEO: it is a very basic system. There are no secrets, no magic tricks; you don’t need to have aced high school English to get to grips with how SEO works. You can also forget about digging deep into your pockets. SEO is a popular marketing tool precisely because you don’t need to spend a fortune for it to work.
To identify the SEO tactics that are going to work best for your website, you need to go to the search engines themselves. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are certainly the top search engines and everyone wants a piece of them. They offer programs and services to help website owners boost the position of their website on search engine results. However, rather than looking to the ‘big three’, if you want to optimize your site effectively, hunt down some of the lesser known, maller, and more specialized search engines.
SEO is not about optimizing for Google. Although Google is the top search engine in most parts of the world (although it accounts for somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of all Internet search traffic), you don’t need to treat it as a holy grail. Optimize your site without fuss. Take advantage of the smaller special interest search engines to boost your vertical or category-specific optimization. The lesser know search engines will get you to Google if you work the right advantage. Have your content crawled and indexed by the lesser known engines, target information sites, news and social groups.
On the other hand, while you’re out crawling the lesser known search engines, beware that submitting your site to thousands of directories isn’t really going to help you. Perhaps you’ve received spam mail offering a quick and easy way to get listed with thousands of web directories. Anything that has a chance of being promised in spam mail is probably not a good thing. Target your web directories instead. Target your audience. Identify search engines that have a strong track record, including good quality inbound links and plenty of them, topical relevance for your site, and a good search engine ranking (for the directory) on one or other of the ‘big three’ search engines. Web directory submissions are a good way to optimize your site and draw attention but be selective.
Look into the real costs of SEO. Although it is a low-cost advertising option and one that does not (repeat, does not) require you to make large financial investments, you might consider hiring an SEO consultant, a programmer or graphic designer, and someone who is capable of managing your links. Even if you decide to do all of the work yourself, you have to factor in your own hourly rate. SEO is not free, it’s low cost based on everything from actual costs to return on investment.
The actual cost of your SEO campaign will depend on the website and your campaign objectives. It could cost anything from a few hundred dollars per month to tens of thousands per month. So long as you are managing your cash flow properly, all you need to think about is your return on investment. If your SEO campaigns are bringing in regular business, if you have a good ROI, you should keep up. If not, make a change.
To measure the success of your SEO campaign, you need to look at a number of marketing metrics. Specifically, you need to chart your keyword ranking, your website traffic (how many people visit your site per day/week/month?), your Return on Investment (how many visitors you secure per dollar spent on your advertising/keywords), and the level of brand awareness your visitors and customers are demonstrating.
When it comes to keywords, many people worry about positioning keywords throughout a website. They post keywords throughout their site, on every page, in every paragraph. This particular myth was popularized by outdated SEO information. Google has tailored its relevancy algorithms to favor natural rather than keyword optimized content. It is far better to cast a wide net for keywords. Feature your primary keywords alongside modifiers, in appropriate sentences. This is the most effective way to boost keyword ranking. Mix up your anchor text and you will also be able to boost your ranking passed on natural links to your website.
It is very important to regularly update your website content to stay on top of your SEO and keyword ranking. Your SEO efforts will start with one-time activities such as keyword research, diagnostic auditing, and diagnostic audit modifications. Once you’ve done this, you will regularly have to conduct competitive analysis, page editing and optimization, and link building strategy implementation to keep your keyword placements.
If your campaign is well organized, you should enjoy a reasonably prompt return on your investments. A good timeframe for natural results is between 30 and 90 days. Regularly reviewing the metrics for your SEO campaign is the best way to monitor the success of your SEO marketing.
The most crucial thing in SEO, however, is the accessibility of your content. Visitors and robots a like must be able to review your site and make sense of it. Try to keep your site simple. Don’t overdo it with multimedia devices or flash (some visitors may not be able to view sites with these features). So long as your keywords are used naturally in your content and your content is accessible, you will enjoy good SEO results with a regular flow of traffic.
Patrick WagnerIDMG.Org - SEO Specialist since 1994- author of the "A to Z Guide to the SEO World" book http://www.patrickwagner.com
