Latitude is a digital marketing agency providing PPC, SEO, analytics, social media, display and affiliate services.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo use software programmes called spiders to crawl the internet and index what they find. Then, when a user types something into a search engine, this index is used to generate the search engine results page (SERP). There are lots of parts of your website that a user never sees but are very helpful to the spiders; these include content tags and XML site maps.
Search Engine Optimisation is an ever-evolving process of improving your visibility to the spiders, so they rank your site as highly as possible on the SERPs, which then gives you better traffic, visitor and revenue levels. This type of search is often called organic, or natural, search results, to differentiate it from Pay Per Click.
Achieving multiple no.1 search engine rankings on lots of keywords no-one searches for is pointless. To ensure you target the most profitable keywords, you must think about your business goals and profitable areas, understand current high referring keywords, analyse your existing SEO and PPC data, uses tools such as Hitwise and those available on Google, and understand how (if at all) your business is affected by seasonality. A thorough and regular review of all the above during the initial stages helps to ensure a ROI-focussed campaign.
Having decided which keywords to target, you now need to ensure you fully expose the content on your website to the spiders. This is called crawlability, and it neatly captures the idea of making a website’s pages accessible to search engines and able to rank well. How you do this depends on which development language and content management system (CMS) your site is built in. You may need to tweak your site’s internal linking structure, remove or restrict duplicate content, optimise CMS setups or completely restructure the site. The goal is always the same – to ensure that all relevant content can be found, indexed and ranked accordingly.
A common SEO cliché is that ‘content is king’. Content is not the only thing that matters, but it still plays a very important part. It is very difficult for any web page to rank well for a keyword that doesn’t appear in the key areas of text on the page. It may be necessary to create and integrate new content, to ensure that all relevant keywords are being targeted.
SEO is no longer just about the text-based results. It can also incorporate all aspects of universal search – images, video, news, products and local search.
Links are (very basically) seen as votes. A link from website A to website B is seen by search engines as a ‘thumbs up’ to website B. This, particularly in Google, is reflected in its ranking algorithm, and the higher the perceived quality of website A, the more positive impact it will have on the rankings of website B. It is very rare to see a web site ranking for a competitive keyword without a high quality link profile with targeted, relevant anchor text. This makes link-building a vital part of SEO success.
It can take 12-18 months to achieve significant and sustainable improvements in organic search results. This is because the age of content is one of the things that search engines rank on; generally the older the content, the more useful it is. However, once you have achieved good rankings, SEO can be much more cost effective and reliable than paid search.
Above all, it is important to analyse the results of your work. How has our work affected rankings, traffic and sales? Which keywords are converting well, and how can we maximise on that? Are certain pages of the website performing better than others, and if so why? These are all areas you should analyse on a regular basis and use the findings to ensure your SEO campaign is directed towards maximising conversion and ROI.
Are you thinking of switching agency? Looking to outsource? Or do you just want to be sure you're not missing a trick or two?
If you're an SME with less than £15,000 a year to spend, Latitude Express offers you expert PPC and SEO services for a fraction of the usual cost.
Copyright © 2009-2010. All rights reserved. Latitude Digital Marketing Limited.
