Improving performance and return on investment through Search Engine Optimisation and other online marketing activity.
Having a website and not optimising it for search engines is:
- Port without Stilton
- Ginger without Fred
- Ant without Dec
It is one of the most important things you can do to your site, and its effects go far beyond simply improving the probability that your site will get found for the right terms.
There was a time when you created a website by simply using HTML code. The aim was to represent your organisation online; so you got the site live and that was the end of it. Its appearance was similar to your print materials and was about as dynamic at fulfilling your business aims. Then one day savvy site owners recognised the benefit of getting listed quickly and high up in the Search Engine returns, colliding with agencies coming the other way to offer the same service.
So the business of Search Engine Marketing was born around 15 years ago. Back in those days it was easy! In August 1995 there were 18,957 websites online. Nowadays they come and go so fast we can’t count them all, however statistics drawn from a survey in May 2008 suggest some 168.5 million sites in total.
Now more than ever, getting maximum performance and ROI out of your site is essential. Defining your organisation’s objectives for its online presence is a start. Site planning, development, construction and launch, so long regarded as a ‘project’, is the initial investment. Maximising return on that investment through SEO ensures your site continues to perform for many years - but only if your site is found, (out of that 170 million), when a user looks for it.
Optimising the site for maximum effect requires a concerted approach, covering a number of different aspects of the site. There are lots of different ways of approaching this but here are some of the core principles:
Keyword Phrase Analysis
Getting returned for the right kinds of search is important, as is the focus and emphasis you give to your site metadata. Keyword phrase analysis aims to clarify what phrases your audiences are using to reach sites like yours. It’s the first step in SEO as well as an enlightening exercise in customer-centricity. It’s not always as straightforward as it seems either – imagine ‘pitch’: is this a slope? musical tone? a business sales activity? a factor in propeller design? a petroleum by-product? a place to play football? and so on.
Information Architecture Audit
Most engines recognise and reward themes (that’s how humans work after all), and pages within a theme should have a distinct and discrete set of content. So it pays to check your site from this point of view. A site with a structure based around your organisation’s departments or divisions might be OK, but it might be better to structure pages and content to suit the site user.
Content Planning
Most SE robots will weight results and ranking according to how the keywords and keyword phrases appear on the page. Greater emphasis is given to some parts of the page; titles carry more weight than body copy and so on. Having your keywords repeated too often on a page look suspicious to a robot, so may carry a penalty, whilst not having them shown often enough is a missed opportunity to optimise the page performance. Pages with a large amount of similar information are suspect. What’s contained in the page metadata should have a clear association with the page text – and so on.
So a detailed content plan that recognises this ensures great performance. And following this approach will not only please the search engines – it will please your site visitors too. As they make that initial scan of your page when it appears in the browser window, they will see the words they are looking for, and will be reassured they have found a relevant site. Chances are they will read what you have to say – rather than reaching immediately for the ‘Back’ button.
Link Generation
It’s not called a website for nothing. Your site is ranked partly according to how many other sites link back to it, and also by the nature of that link. So relevant link generation gives you the double bonus of more traffic as a direct consequence of the link and an uplift in search rank. Techniques for gaining links include reciprocal links with partner or associate sites, PR activity online, social networking and Web2 activity and the use of online directories.
Files, Image and Link Tags
So far we’ve talked mostly about page copy – that is, page text on the site. The alt-tags associated with images and internal and external links in your own site are also read by the robots and give a further opportunity to optimise the site effectively. This extends to ensuring that flash files and other ‘obscure’ content is properly tagged or it won’t be read by the robots.
Technical Quality
The site must be built to an appropriate standard. It will perform better if it contains metadata to guide the Search Engine robots through the site, directs them to key content and excludes irrelevant information. The sitemap is key to providing the full ‘picture’ of the site to the robots. The page url is important too, and different site technologies render them in different ways, some more SEO friendly than others. The root url will index well so it becomes a choice that should be informed by your SEO aspirations as well as other factors.
Maintaining good site optimisation and maximum rankings are essential to get the best value from your site. They’re not something that it’s appropriate to leave to chance or to an untrained administrator. Content managed sites offer marvellous flexibility and versatility but also a risk of accidentally undoing carefully prepared optimisation work. Similarly, writing copy for the web becomes a more precise business once you understand how a few well-researched and placed phrases on each page can make such a difference to site performance.
Ensure that this kind of work is done on your site and you are on the way to getting:
- Better usability – your site has been structured and populated in a way that makes sense to your target users
- Better content – it’s been carefully worked to be legible, succinct and focussed
- Better Search Engine performance – you are more likely to be found for the right kind of searches
- Better traffic across the site
- Happier users
- A better return on your investment
Innovation Digital ensures that sites are built to suit the requirements of Search Engines, and offers planning, training and implementation of a full range of SEO activity. Contact Us today to find out how we can help you ‘Make your website perform’