31^st July 2010

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) / Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Why is Search Engine Marketing important?

About 90% of all on-line traffic is achieved by various search engines. You may have an amazing website which is pushing the boundaries on design or has the newest most compliant code, or has an amazing interactive flash interface, however, if your site can't be found, what is the point in having a site in the first place?

Search Engine Marketing is all about getting people to your site, driving traffic from as many places as possible to your site. There are several ways to drive people to your site:

Natural optimisation - this involves targeting certain keywords and changing your site to push these select keywords while still allowing the content to make sense, thus increasing the position of your site in a search engine.

Link Building - this is basically getting lots of good quality links to point to your site, this will increase your Google page rank as each link shows that a website feels your site is worth being shared. This is often achieved by using directories, linking sites etc. It is all very well getting a lot of sites pointing to you but if they all have low page rank and the search engine doesn't value them highly then the links to your site won't be as strong as other sites which are thought of as highly.

Adverts - this is often archived by using PPC (pay per click) this is usually done on Google as it is currently the leading search engine provider. PPC adverts are located at the top of the results page and along the side. Google will charge a fee for each time your site is clicked on. It is also only posted when people are searching for related topics eg. If someone is searching for boats and you sell bespoke kitchens then there is little point showing your advert. There are also many other ways to increase your sites potential. Feel free to get in touch if you would like to talk about getting some Search Engine Optimisation done on your site.

SEO does take time and can be done in small stages. This can often be annoying as you may not see much change for the first few months after the first stage of SEO has occurred as it takes time for search engines to pick up on your site, then to pick up on links to your site and then also to increase your position in the results.

Can I perform SEO on my own site or should I use a company?

You could spend time learning the ins and outs of SEO and then go and spend the time trying to get your site moving up the results page. However, there is a lot to search engine optimisation and it is possible to cause damage to your sites position by not knowing what to do. If you want results then I would advise that you use an SEO professional, as they will know good places to post your site and also know how to get results fast. Often people make the mistake of wanting to make a perfect keyword driven site to begin with, this however is the wrong way to go about it. If you try and push keywords too hard what your content is trying to say could be easily lost in a pile of meaningless keywords. On top of this, search engines may see your site as spamming keywords, (this is where your site is deliberately putting in a long list of keywords just to gain a good position). It is all about getting the right balance of keywords to content. The method I use is to build the site with SEO in mind, and write the content as normal then, once the site is live or about to go live, I go through and edit the content to optimise the site. On top of that you can also build links and drive traffic through PPC.

If you would like to talk more about SEO feel free to get in touch with me.

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