There are currently around 200,000,000 websites on the internet, with approximately 100,000 being added every day. This makes for a huge landscape in which it’s very easy to get lost. No matter how functional, informative or funky your website is, without Online Marketing it will simply be lost in cyberspace. This article intends to give you a brief overview of the considerations and actions that you can take in order to - GET NOTICED.

50 - 60% of web users use search engines as their first point of contact to find something on the internet. If you want customers to find you, you need to be seen and have a voice. Visability can be achieved through a planned and effective online marketing strategy. Within the strategy you need to consider the various channels available to you. These are:-

• Organic seo
• Pay per click
• Email marketing
• Promotions and campaigns

In this article we intend to purely focus on organic search engine optimisation (SEO). In future articles we will discuss pay per click, email marketing, promotions and campaigns.

Organic SEO (natural listings in search engines)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Organic SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.

It’s worth remembering the benefits of Organic SEO…

• High return on investment
• Long term positioning
• Targeted traffic
• Increased brand visibility
• Search engines and websites that work 24/7
• Higher sales

Unfortunately Organic SEO is not an instant process, and requires a dedicated, sustained effort to keep your company high in the rankings. In SEO the results can never be guaranteed as markets continually shift and evolve, however with a strategy in place and a sustained, structured and ongoing campaign in progress, you’ll be in a good place to compete for a position within the top ten!

The following activities are required to optimise your ranking and other techniques and best practices which will improve your natural listing in the search engines:-

Stage 1 - SEO evaluation

It’s important to undertake a website appraisal to determine if and where it may be necessary to reconfigure your website to maximise the opportunities for SEO. During the evalution you will need to undertake some keyword and competitor analysis to determine your current position to understand which keywords to adopt and how much effort will be required to best improve your rankings. The deliverable for this phase should be the website appraisal and recommendations, competitor and keyword analysis.

Stage 2 - Website on-page optimisation

These are potentially code and content amendments that need to be made physically on your website. We need to ensure that not only the content contains appropriate keywords but also ensure that these are composed into the website correctly. They should descend correctly with the tags within the html code (page title, URL, Meta data, H1, H2, p, links, alt etc.). It’s extremely important that the keywords are present and accessible to the search engine crawler when it indexes your website.

Stage 3 - Website off-page optimisation

As previously stated, the internet is a vast landscape and you operate from a blip on the landscape! It’s essential that you spread you visibility across the internet, through other websites. Essentially you should aim to become a ‘subject matter expert’ in the eyes of the search engine. If you keep popping up across the internet in relation to the given subject matter then you’re part of the way to being considered a ‘subject matter expert’. Even better if the places that you appear are also considered to be a high quality website by the search engine. 

Some possible off page activities might include:

• Directories submissions
• Usurping competitors’ links
• Link searches
• Article writing
• Forums and online communities
• Blogging and commentating

Stage 4 – On going analysis (learn and improve)

Organic SEO is a bit of a moving target as the competition is continually reviewing and depolying new activities in the race for the top positions. Also the search engines will regularly change the way they crawl and index the website adding yet another layer of challenges.  It’s crucial to monitor what you are doing and continually review how your activities are being received and reacted to by the search engines. It is only by doing this level analytics that you can learn and improve which is the key to long term success.

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you want a sample of an SEO Evaluation Report. We can also offer a FREE SEO evaluation for your business, simply contact us and we’ll get this organized. Finally we have a series of ‘overview’ documents for both SEO and PPC so once again just email us and we’ll get these across to you.

I hope you found this article useful and I look forward to delivering my next article on PPC in due course.

Other relevant links:
http://www.mvgmedia.com/search-engine-optimisation
http://www.mvgmedia.com/online-marketing
http://www.mvgmedia.com/conversion-optimisation