SEO – A few thoughts about driving users to your site.

I may be telling you what you already know but heres some basic tenets and advise.

The bones of it fall under three main categories; PPC, affiliate programmes and organic search, with that in mind I think you’ll achieve the quickest and best results by doing a little (or alot) of each but personally I think PPC should be used the least, as many people including myself share a distrust for paid advertising on SERP’s (search engine result pages).

PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)

Advertising on Google can cost you a couple of cents per click if you are in a line of business with little to no competition, like wise it can cost you well in excess of €1 per click if you are in a very competitive market. Run a search for some of the keywords you would be looking for and see how many companies are advertising there, that will give you an idea.

If you are not great at PPC or don’t have a web site that converts well, PPC might just cost you money.

Affiliate Programmes

Where another website displays an ad banner of yours, in the case of a blog they also actively recruits people to buy from you in return for a commission, considering there making money out of it, its in there interest to recommend you. Note -Commission is based on actual sales, rather than just clicks, but you have to pay for the software to handle it.

MAP’s comes fairly highly recommended, heres the link – http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/

Organic Optimization

A witchcraft of sorts but absolutely necessary, organic meaning getting your site high up in SERP’s rankings for customers to find. If you have the money to retain a specialist company then brilliant but their serious money, possibly a freelancer would be cheaper again. BUT on the other hand much of the optimization you could do yourself with a little bit of research, and a fair amount of time. Be warned though, this is not a magic quick fix but a long term objective requiring you to plug away daily over a period of maybe 6 months.

Organic SEO his falls under two categories Internal meaning how the website is written, and Off Page – that you promoting it.

Keypoints of Optimization.

Keywords – These are in the head tag of you source code, in your links and alt tags and also in your page content. They work together meaning one without the other is significantly less effective. There are many hidden tricks to this so read, talk and learn loads.

With a brand new site like mine for example; keywords such as ‘Web’ and ‘Design’ are pretty useless, this is because theres literally hundreds of well established companies using these same keywords so I’ll naturally fall underneath them (horribly that means the 20th page or so), a better solution is ‘Keyword phrases’;

in my case this would ‘cheap web design dublin’ or ‘dublin website designers’. the point is this; I’m aiming at a more specific search enquiry and thus making myself a slightly larger fish in a smaller pond if you catch my drift. As you get more established you can move from 3 & 4 word phrases to 1 & 2 words. Google Webmaster Tools or wordtracker will help you work out the correct phrases and jenning up on the topic, theres a bucket of information on the web about it too. Keywords is about ‘Choosing your battles to win the war’ and not picking the biggest fight which you cant win’

Site maps

Make sure you have one. these are essential once your site grows past a couple of pages. Site Maps help search engine spiders/bots find there way around you site.

Link Building (One Way & Reciprocal)

Search engines highly rate links; every link is a strand of a web coming back to your site, the bigger the web you build, the higher you rank.

Again, Link Quality is something that would take pages to explain in detail, but to keep it very simple, you want links from good sites that get a lot of visitors. Use your common sense, if you don’t like the site, don’t bother getting a link from it. Quality and Relevance matter alot!!!

Blogs / News Section

Here I go again – Search engine love news section, again it adds to your sites credibility, and it allows you to add more content and more topics for the spiders to catalogue, an opportunity to communicate more keywords, a reason for viewers to quote and link to you, thus a bigger web.

Off Page Search Engine Optimization

Talk online about you site or anything else that your interested, but make sure you have a link to http://www.mydomain.com in your post. again your adding a strand to your web and networking with potential clients too. Look for free adds like gumtree. Just get your name out there as much as you can.

Register you site with many search engines (many believe this has no value but its a ten minute job and it isn’t going to hurt).

Ancillary Portals

Twitter, Facebook, Wiki, Flickr, etc, these all build you up and generate traffic.

Plan Plan and Plan again.

If your creating a site and want to build traffic, you need to set out a plan first (or get your designer too) and then build you website to deliver that plan, rather than the other way around, its the quintessential chicken or egg story. This plan ideally should be created before the site is build that you may incorporate much of these selling points into the written content that the end user reads without it feeling contrived, and also heavily represented within the hidden code (meta tag keyword & description / page name / alt tags / anchors / image file names)

You can retro fit all of this to an existing site easily enough but essentially your double jobbing and paying for what a good designer (like me ) could have done in the first place.

The Bottom Line – Be Authentic & Relative

I Cant stress this enough ‘Be Authentic and Relative’ In everything to do with Search Engine Optimization, the words Authentic & Relative are by far the most important factors.

If what your are doing for Search Engine Optimization is not Authentic & Relative, Search Engines, (especially Google) will eventually see through it.

Authentic; What ever you do has to be real, don’t try to fool the Search Engines, don’t use tricks.

Relative; If your web site is about “French Cooking”, the best links to your site will be from other Cooking related web sites, with other French Cooking web sites being the best. For example, a link from a site selling Dog food wouldn’t be a good link

Tags: SEO