In order to maximize the effectiveness of your web presence, you need to be easily found by your target audience. A significant component of a successful online marketing strategy is making sure pages within your site have a prominent position in the results pages of major search engines for the phrases most likely to be entered by people interested in your content. The ongoing process of improving that visibility is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
A wide variety of factors influence a site's visibility in search engines, including:
Core Five will work with you to tailor a custom plan that considers these and other factors, creating an SEO strategy specific to your needs. This is a collaborative process; it's critical for site owners to participate in the development of the plan and understand its progressive nature. Effective, targeted SEO is not something you simply purchase, or only have to do once.
What are the criteria that define success? Effective SEO is about improving the quality of traffic to your site, which does not necessarily equate to being number one on Google for your favorite keyword. Identifying a target audience and understanding how they are motivated allows us to focus our efforts and achieve meaningful results.
Most site owners have access to some form of analytics software, either traditional server-side log analyzers like WebTrends, or web-based tools like Google Analytics. Unfortunately, the reports generated by these tools are often ignored, misunderstood, or misinterpreted, but they contain invaluable information about which sites are bringing you traffic, what terms are being used to find your site, and which pages users are viewing the most often, and for the longest periods of time. This data helps us target areas for improvement, refine your strategy over time, and boost overall conversion.
Examining how well your top competitors rank for typical searches can provide valuable insight. What key phrases do they target? What inbound and reciprocal links do they have, and are they appropriate targets for our link building strategy? What types of content are they publishing, and how is it structured? What things do they all have in common, and what things are they missing that could provide us with a competitive advantage?
A carefully selected mix of keywords will form the basis of content optimization and link building efforts. Determining the exact phrases to target requires insight into the mind of the potential customer, combined with concrete usage data available straight from sources like Google Trends as well as aggregate sources like the WordTracker database. Starting with a base list of highly relevant terms, we must take into consideration their synonyms, relative popularity, amount of competition, degree of specificity, localization, and other factors.
When search engines examine the pages of a site, all they see is text, and despite advances in search engine technology which have made the text contained within Flash movies, PDF's, and other "rich" assets more accessible, it's still important for a site's content to be published as plain browser text. Optimized text will contain a mix of relevant, targeted key phrases, synonyms, and contextual links to other parts of the site. It should be concise and broken down into easily digestible chunks without sacrificing flow or readability for users.
Closely tied to the composition of the content is the manner in which it is structured in the HTML coding. Properly written HTML provides a hierarchy for denoting the relative importance of the various blocks of text on a page, and search engines take this hierarchy into consideration. A properly structured page will present headings, links, and other content in a way that clearly emphasizes your key terms to search engines, regardless of the visual presentation. A good content management system such as Core Five's Cambio CMS can integrate with your site's visual style to ensure that content published through the system adheres to these rules.
A site's relative importance is closely tied to how many other important sites link to it, since search engines logically assume that if that site is at the nexus of a cluster of related links, it must be an authoritative source of content for a given topic. Thus, a key component of SEO strategy is continual efforts to identify quality sites which might be willing to provide links to your site, preferably using one of your key phrases as the clickable text within the link. Likely candidates include vendors, partners, suppliers, and customers, as well as industry-specific publications, organizations, and human-edited directories. More broadly, there are social bookmarking sites, forums, and mailing lists, and distribution systems for press releases.