SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – The Truth
Here is a quick explanation for all you aspiring SEO graduates. Search Engine Optimisation is the number one question asked of website designers. The reason is simple, as websites become more prolific it becomes increasingly necessary to ensure you don’t get lost in the crowd.
We like to give the analogy of the shopfront; as a business you need to have a shopfront to sell your products. A website is simply your shopfront on the internet. Even if you don’t sell your product through an online store, your website is selling your product through the marketing of that product and providing the information on how to purchase.
SEO Reality – Lesson One
- Location, Location, Location
- “Page Views” = Customer
- “Hits” = Arrogance
- There is No Silver Bullet in SEO
- More Key Word Searches, Not Less
The Key to a shopfront is not only about what you are selling but also your location. If you put your shopfront under a bridge, no one will find you. The same is true for your website. You can’t expect to simply create a website and walk away – not worrying about updating an monitoring it’s success/failure.
SEO is all about analyzing your website content & structure to ensure that you are attracting customers – and specifically your customers. This is a common mistake that website owners make, Hits vs Views. Having Hits on your site simply means that somebody has found your site. Where as “Views” means that someone actually stayed and viewed the content on your site. “Page Views” are what you are trying to achieve. The more Pages Views you have, the better you have done at attracting the person that is actually interested in your product… In General.
Another common mistake that is made – is believing that there is one Silver Bullet in SEO (or focusing on one or two factors). Search Engine Optimisation needs to be looked at in a holistic way. There are several important criteria to focus on ….but this does not mean that doing any one or even all of these things will enable you to achieve success. There are times when you will have to pay for a good listing. Sorry, but that is the reality.
The last mistake that we will cover here is – the mistake of the 1 magical search criteria. This is the idea that your customers will only use one type of search terms. For example, if you where selling shoes you would only want to focus on the search terms “buy shoes”. This is wrong on several levels. First, these search terms tend to be too generic and thus highly competitive and not necessarily attracting the customers that buy your shoes. For example, this type of search criteria would provide all types of “shoe selling websites”- wholesale, mens & womens shoes, shoe designers, even second hand shoes, and just general blogs/personal sites writing about buying shoes. The second problem with the “1 magical search criteria” concept is that your customers will use a vast array of different search terms to find your product. This is always the case and the best thing to do is realise that you will need to focus on several different search terms to have overall success.
We hope that this gives you a little taste of the issues that are involved in Search Engine Optimisation. We also highly recommend that you come to our SEO Training Seminars where you can get an indepth understanding of Search Engine Optimisation that you can put into practice right away.
If you want more …. Sign-up for one of our SEO Training Seminars.