SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Before starting your SEO …

The first thing to do is to ask yourself why you want a website. Having clarified your objectives you then need to figure out who your customers are, what do they want and how your website will help them.

Your customers will exhibit different personalities, have different life-experiences, use the internet in differently and have different needs. What angles will they be approaching your product and your company from?

In order to sell you also have to know what you’re selling. Is it reliability, status, convenience, quality, peace of mind or hope? If the appeal of your cast-iron wrench is its ruggedness when used at the bottom of a sewer then it’s not much use focussing your marketing efforts on how good it looks in the lounge.

Knowing a little about your customers and what your company is selling you then need to spend some time on working out keyphrases that your customers are likely to use in the search engines. Regular analysis of your log files can further narrow down the most effective phrases .

Copywriting

Next the copy is written. Each page is targeted at a couple of keyphrases  whilst simultaneously taking your customers through the buying cycle. The Title Tag also appears to carry a lot of weight still. Ideally the text that appears below the Title Tag in the SERPS will tempt users to visit your site, though no one can control what text the Search Engines choose to show.

Linking and Other Ranking Factors

A basic linking strategy is drawn up. The ranking of sites in search engines is still largely determined at present (2011) by how many other ‘good quality’ sites link to yours, though usage data and social signals appear to be increasingly important.

Link-building requires an investment of resources – time, energy, money, contacts etc. – to reach out to suppliers, customers and your niche community and persuade them to link to you.

Internal link-building focuses weight on pages that you value – for example those that highlight your expertise

Some of the many, many ranking factors that Search Engines are likely to consider when ranking websites probably include personalisation (user A gets different results from user B), semantic indexing (no, I haven’t a clue either), bookmark managers (X people bookmarked this page for X weeks and then no one did), browser navigation (you went to site B, pressed the back button and came back to site A, scrolled down the page and kept that page open for one minute), social network analysis (these groups link to these other groups, these sites play such and such a role, information flows from here to here …) and offline branding (X people saw a T.V. advert and searched for Brand A).

Search Engine optimisation is getting more and more difficult. The big corporate players are cottoning on to SEO whilst at the same time the Search Engines are seeking to monetize every stage of the buying cycle, so that smaller players risk being outmanoeuvred and priced out of the market (there are only a limited number of top slots for keywords, and small companies only have limited budgets for PPC). To get visibility and credibility small businesses need to throw resources – time, money, energy, contacts – into their marketing strategies to create brands, or to create something truly exceptional that they can leverage in other ways.

The Future Is Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is beginning to reflect offline marketing. The days of the simple tricks that ranked sites at the top of the SERPS are rapidly drawing to a close. The Search Engines are getting better at analysing signals of quality and are demanding more of those signals before a website will rank.

But the demands of Search Engines for new signals threaten small businesses. When you hand your data to Google you ought to be aware that Google is likely to use it against you. For example, Google Checkout allows Google access to data that no sane businesses would want to reveal. How many units of their product were sold? What is the probable industry-wide profit-margin on these items?  How many chargebacks were there? What is the company’s market share? How does it compare to its competitors? What could it afford to pay for advertising? Combine this with the wealth of data Google can mine from a company’s Adwords campaigns and Google Analytics, and the data about users that it can mine from Google Accounts, Chrome, Google toolbar, Gmail and search queries and Google almost certainly knows more about your company’s market and its place in it than you do.

Search Engines haven’t yet acquired Artificial Intelligence, but given their resources and drive and the user-demand for relevance you can see the direction they’re heading in. And unfortunately Google is morphing into a deeply unpleasant corporation (PDF) beholden to no one ….

Finally …

Don’t rely on Search Engines for business success. Google in particular change the rules every day and has completely lost its moral compass. High rankings are icing on the cake but to drive traffic to your website reliably and to convert it you need a sound business model that delivers what your customers want, incorporates organic SEO and (possibly) pay per click advertising and integrates online and offline factors – with the emphasis on offline.