As a business owner with a website, one of the most important things to consider is visibility. SEO also known as search engine optimisation, is a daunting project if not approached correctly.
There are many ways to tackle SEO such as content creation, link building, keyword research and many more.
The danger of doing SEO without any prior knowledge can be detrimental to your website as many tactics that can be used may end up getting your site penalised.
Building Blocks
When beginning any search marketing campaign there are processes to address, firstly keyword research.
Without in depth keyword research a campaign can fall at the first step as identifying the correct keywords/phrases is vital to any success.
Once a defined list has been agreed the next phase is to then look at the website from an on-page and technical perspective.
This can identify any structural issues with the website as well identifying areas to improve.
Content is also a vital part of on page work to undertake, make sure your content is unique, not to keyword heavy, a reasonable amount of keywords to mention is perhaps 1-2 per 200 words, make the content useful for the user as conversion is the main goal for any website.
Patience
Once the website has then been ‘optimised’ for the SERPs (search engine results pages), patience is the next important part of SEO as it’s not a quick fix.
It can take the search engine’s time to re-crawl your updated site so a handy tip is submitting an updated sitemap.xml file to the Google Webmaster Tools console (account setup and verification needed). This can help inform Google of changes and new pages to crawl.
Now a little bit of time has passed and your newly optimise site is appearing for your researched terms in the SERP’s what next?
Links
Link building is an important part of SEO as links to your site count as a ‘vote’ but be careful when trying to attract links to your site as there are key factors involved to ensure a link to your site will be beneficial.
Relevancy is key, if your site is about and a site about laptops links to yours there is no relevancy between the 2 and therefore could be viewed as spamming which if this technique is adopted can lead to poor results.
Quality Over Quantity
Ensuring that the quality of a link is relevant to your site topic can lead to greater results 1 link from a highly related website will have more benefits than having 10′s to hundreds of unrelated links which could lead to a penalty.
End Results
SEO is a steady progression and making the wrong choices on a small budget can cost SME’s a lot more in terms of money if the wring strategy is adopted.
UPDATE
As SEO Account Director at MEC Manchester SEO Operations manager for Latitude Digital Marketing‘s I have seen businesses that use ‘black hat seo’ techniques as well as poorly planned strategies come a cropper compared to a professional and well planned campaign that reaps rewards.
