SEO is one of those professions which is seemingly black magic, teeming with telemarketers and a highly evolved form of snake oil. Often SEO consultants don’t even tell their friends what they do for a living, simply choosing to dumb it down to marketing. This is primarily due to a misunderstanding of the entire SEO process – we thought today’s blog post should therefore be about the components of SEO. A good SEO campaign should be comprised of 3 components: Research, Onsite and Offsite Optimisation. Far too many of the SEO firms out there focus the majority of their efforts on either onsite or offsite optimisation, often forgetting the research components all together and therefore dooming the campaign from the beginning.
Research
SEO research comprises a few components, the first is a goal setting session with the client, this is where we discuses and learn about your goals, what makes your business different and unique. Sometimes clients goals exceed their reach and it is important to make sure that everyone is on the same page prior to any work beginning or money changing hands. Once we fully understand what our client is looking to achieve, we can then conduct extensive market research on their behalf and gather a list of keywords and key phrases that will allow us to help drive quality/targeted traffic to your website that will convert into new leads and sales for your business. Once everyone has agreed upon a set of keywords we can devise a strategy to get the target website ranking for those terms.
Onsite Optimisation
Onsite optimisation can take many forms, but primarily revolves around modifying content, text and images and linking structures on your website to better illustrate to Google and the major search engines what your site is about, and which keywords/phrases it should rank well for. Often we will require the client to produce new content for their site or other properties in order to facilitate proper onsite optimisation, depending on the clients current situation and goals this can range from a single 500 word press release/article all the way up to thousands of pages of new content for large corporate networks or product portfolios.
Offsite Optimisation
A primary component of any SEO campaign is offsite optimisation, commonly refereed to link building. A very simply way to think about link building is considering each link to your site from an external site as a vote, the more votes your site gets – the more it will influence the search engines will assign to your site and consequently the higher your ranking will be. Unlike an election however, not every vote carries the same value links from websites related to the same topic as your website carry more weight and links from sites that themselves have many links carry additional weight. When building links it is important to keep the links relevant to your sites content and don’t build too many too fast – too many links built in a short period of time can be viewed as SPAM and have a negative effect in the long run.