Search Engine Optimisation
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of increasing the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via search results for targeted keywords. For instance, a company that sells classical music cd's online would want its web site to be listed as near to the top of the search results displayed to the web user when using the key phrase 'classical music cd's'. Generally the higher your site ranks, the better the search engine optimisation employed.
Who Needs Search Engine Optimisation?
Over the last few years the number of online businesses has increased dramatically. This was largely due to the overall online experience becoming more enjoyable through improved infrastructure, like the introduction of broadband and more secure online solutions/applications improving consumer confidence.
However, because of an ever-increasing number of businesses now taking the medium seriously as a revenue channel, it has become a hugely fierce and high-risk venture. It can cost large sums of money for a business to develop an online system and if you do not see a return of investment it can hurt.
Search engines generally only display ten results per page and the average end user will only go to about page three of any results returned for a search. Therefore if you are not on one of the first three pages then you might as well not exist online.
Types of Search Engine Optimisation
Organic Search Engine Optimisation – This is the first port of call where you can improve your rankings. It is called organic because it defines how well your website can be ranked without resorting to external methods of increasing traffic.
- Your domain name
- The website architecture (structure)
- Content
With each of the above is vital that your website has been created with the knowledge of how these elements when used correctly give outstanding results.
Link Building – Many companies now offer an instant link building service and submission to an ever-increasing number of websites. What they don’t tell you is that this can have a hugely negative affect on your website if not carried out correctly. Search engines look at the quality of the inbound links to your website and use this to give pages within your website importance. They also employ methods to stop the abuse of this where by anyone would be able to create thousands of links for any topic to increase their websites ranking. Link building is a process that needs nurturing and websites need to be selected carefully to put links on. If you put a link on a blacklisted website it makes you look bad. If you increase the number of inbound links too quickly, then they can see this and it can have a negative result. It is not as easy to carry out as it sounds and you must ensure you use a specialist who knows what they are doing.
Third Party Advertising – This is where you create an advertisement on a website that is displayed to the end user. It can come in the form of banner advertising or Pay Per Click. Again this needs to be carried out carefully. There is no point spending money on wasted advertising. What needs to be considered is that you are advertising your product or service in a place where the end user viewing the advert is likely to respond in a positive way. If I were selling guitars there would be no point in advertising on a women’s clothes portal. A much more targeted website where I am more likely to receive quality traffic would be a music portal specifically such as band music etc.
Viral Marketing – Viral marketing is used to entice the end user into becoming involved in some medium such as watching a video or reading an email where they are entertained and you gradually make them aware of your product or service without revealing that the medium is actually an advert.
How Why Can Help You
As you can now see, achieving high rankings within the Search Engines is a must and making sure that this is carried out correctly requires a deep understanding and experience from experts such as Why Digital Media. What Why Digital Media do is create positive results outlined below:
- Understand Our Client – It is crucial that in order to know our target audience we know our client and what they are offering. We become involved in understanding your business, knowing your competitors and looking to help your business grow in the long term. This is achieved through onsite meetings to improve our knowledge of you and culture us in your ethos and business practices.
- Keyword Research – Why Digital Media will begin to look at who your customers are, what mediums they use to find the products they want and what keywords they use. This will again help us develop our strategy to improve your business goals.
- Analyse Existing Solutions – Once we have achieved an understanding of your business, customers and keywords Why Digital Media will analyse your current online solutions. This involves us creating a report that details your current strengths and weaknesses and how any flaws can be improved based on the knowledge we have gained through methods 1 and 2.
- Optimise Site Content – Why Digital Media will begin to look at your content and advise on how this can be improved to give better search engine optimisation. Why Digital Media may even advise you on how to create new content to get the results we need.
- Link Building –
Once all of the above is in place Why Digital Media will be ready to start the link building campaign. Why Digital Media will concentrate our efforts into making sure we target the appropriate sites to place inbound links.
- Client Feedback – Why Digital Media will provide detailed feedback at regular intervals so that you can see what improvements are being made and how we achieved them. It is vital that you are aware of the quantity of work that is involved in achieving a high Search Engine Ranking.
