Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Understanding what SEO is and how it is performed is vital to your decision regarding how your website should be marketed and who you feel can do it correctly. Whether or not you want to partner up with me is ultimately your choice, but at the very least I would like to share my knowledge with you on this topic to help you come to an informed decision.

SEO Fundamentals

Your web site was designed to serve as the public face for your services or products. However, the public expects your site to be presented in a manner that is visually appealing to the eye, easy to navigate and establishes trust in your services or products. SEO is part website development tools and part marketing tools used to leverage visitors into contacting you with confidence. Listed below are typical SEO and other internet marketing practices to achieve said goals;

• Looking over the site's past-to-present performance through existing analytics or server logs to understand weaknesses and strengths in regards to visitor activity and conversions
• Performing changes to your sites' content and coding to address the discoveries from their research
• Implementing "high search volume" keywords used by your target audience into your website's content to help elevate your ranking on the search engines. It's vital that the copy on page makes sense to visitors and is written with care to not appear "spammy" or questionable.
• Examining overall visitor usability issues such as poorly laid out navigation, testing for visual defects on different internet browsers and operating systems, broken links or missing images and the prominence of "call-to-action" items that your visitors should pay the most attention to.
• Establishing multiple contacts with other webmasters from trustworthy, relevant websites for attaining links to your site. The link itself should be variations of the keywords and phrases you are attempting to rank for.
• If approved by you as the client, submitting press releases for exposure and more keyword ranking opportunities is another common practice.
• SEO's will take part in setting up and enforcing content quality control for a company blog. A SEO practitioner will ensure that beneficial content and online reach is being attained through high traffic channels. RSS aggregation networks and social bookmarking platforms are common for this.
• If applicable, SEO practitioners will coordinate viral marketing events such as video sharing on networks like YouTube and Google Video. Another variation would be encouraging visitors to download/share some sort of online publication (PDF's, newsletters or other files) with the goal of a quick build up in visitor activity and inbound links from as many sites as possible.
• Some form of data tracking/analytics will be put in place, usually on your website's hosting environment and/or directly onto the files that make up your website. It will not violate your agreement with your hosting company.

Is SEO Right For You?

Like I said before, that's ultimately up to you to decide. However, I have put together a downloadable SEO Checklist for you to use as a starting point for assessing what your site needs and what marketing avenues might be the most beneficial.

Client / Vendor Obligations

This isn't so much "set in stone" as it is just common sense to protect you and the SEO practitioner from landing the marketing project in a mess of some sort.

• A contract must be drawn up. Do not accept the terms unless you are fully aware of what they mean and you are comfortable with them.
• Getting regular reports reflecting overall website activity in key metric areas like weekly or monthly conversion totals, keyword rankings, traffic and pageviews or other specific areas. This information is your inside track to understanding what your visitors want, and what your investment is returning.
• You should ALWAYS contact your SEO if anything is planned that will affect the website at ANY level. We can provide you with some great advice prior, during and after the event.
• Stay within professional boundaries. A dedicated SEO practitioner will invest some emotional real estate and ego into their work for you, but understand that it is a matter of professional pride. We want you to succeed and we really try to make it happen 10 fold.

SEO Myths & Truths

If you have heard negative things about SEO and online marketing, I would like to suggest that you visit the FAQ section to see if it's addressed there.

Bottom Line

Treat SEO as an extension to your existing marketing budget and ideas. This does cost money. Results are not instant. You will need patience. You will need to be a part of decision making. Getting started is the hardest part, but the SEO practitioner does nearly all the work. The end results more than make up for everything it took to get from point A to point B!