What the #$@! Is SEO?
What's it All About?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) encompasses a range of activities, designed to generate traffic to a website by utilising the functionality that has been built by the giants of the Search Industry such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. These companies now dominate the internet, and Search engines have become the most common way for internet users to locate goods and services, do research, or just look for useless tidbits of information. The big question is; in this massive and rapidly rising sea of websites, how does a user locate your special island?
The two most common SEM techniques are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which utilises the organic (or free) search functionality provided by the Search Engines, and Paid Search (or PPC).
Natural or Organic Search
As recent studies indicate, web-users are approximately four times more likely to click on an organic search result than a paid one, thus the achievement of high organic rankings is really the blue ribbon of SEM and true, long term, sustainable results are very difficult to achieve, especially on competitive keywords or search terms. Good SEO involves the integration of many elements, technical, logical, textual, contextual, analytical and intellectual. Some of the activities involved are:
Site development
It is imperative that the website itself is perfectly Search Engine friendly. This is not as simple as it sounds and not simply a case of tweaking titles and meta data. The actual site infrastructure (including off-page factors) needs to be analyzed and developed to ensure that there are no hidden pitfalls or it does not appear too 'over-optimized'.
Content optimisation
Search engines such as Google cannot see the great artwork or witty animations on your site, they can only read text. Therefore sufficient amounts of good, relevant, textual content is required. All content on the site will need to be checked against SEO requirements and changed as necessary. Additional content will be sourced and implemented where required.
Link development
Link-building is a requirement of any SEO strategy and to perform it correctly can be extremely difficult. We will be focusing on using quality link assurance, smart deep linking and anchor text management with constant tracking and analysis.
Data collection and analysis
Underlying all elements of our strategy is our site, industry and competitor analysis system: Industry Intelligence™. This system removes a lot of the trial and error aspects of SEO and ensures that all strategic decisions are based on exact information.
Paid Search or Pay Per Click (PPC)
Paid Search or Pay per Click (PPC), refers to the sponsored ads that appear on the Search Engine's right margin and the top of the screen, above the organic search results. The most common Paid Search systems are Google's Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Microsoft AdCentre. The secret to success in PPC is optimisation, both of the ad placements and bidding process (position, keyword, price, copy) and the conversion of the resulting traffic into sales revenues on the client's own website.