With such a huge amount of information - both valid and very misleading - floating around on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it has become very difficult to separate fact from fiction.

When you take the above into account, and the fact that SEO changes almost as much as the weather in Melbourne, it is virtually impossible for a novice or business owner to know where to start with SEO, and boosting sales via their website .

We at Newpath WEB understand your pain and have put this article together to give you a hand, and give you an introduction to the basics of SEO.

What Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

It doesn’t  matter if you have the best looking site on the Internet. If no one (prospective clients) can find it, it’s useless.  That’s the essence of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) makes a website search engine friendly, ensuring Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major search engines are aware of your site, its content, and what its purpose is. By acheiving this, these search engines will then deliver qualified traffic to your website, and if you have a well built website you should be able to convert that traffic into actual customers.

The task of optimising a website aims increase a website’s ranking in search engines by making pages within the site friendly to search engines. The more friendly a website is to Google, the higher its rankings in the search engine results pages will be, with the net result of this being a higher likleyhood your site will earn higher amounts of traffic and make more sales. It is stating the obvious that a website with a result on Page 1 of Google is going to get more traffic than a site buried on Page 8 in the results.

There is avery simple and important message here: If your website is missing from top search results, then you are not capitalising on your ability to generate new business and add revenue to your bottom line. Here are the facts:

1. There is currently in excess of 1.3 billion Internet users worldwide
2. It is known that over 85% of these users start at a search engine when looking for information, or seeking to make a purchase
3. Less than 25% of Internet users will go beyond the top 10 search engine results - meaning they dont bother looking futher than page one results.
4. Top 10 search engine results get 80% more traffic than those ranked in the 11-30 spots

Aside from earning good ranking in search engines, having your website optimised will help your business in other areas such as:

1. Brand awareness
2. Setting up your company as a credible supplier, and an authority
3. Pre-qualified lead generation
4. The sole advertising medium that can be truly tracked, and return on investment calculated
5. Significant cost savings when compared to other advertising mediums such as glossy brochures, TV ads, radio ads, and yellow pages ads.

The nuts and bolts of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is made up of several key elements that when combined will increase a website’s search engine ranking, increase traffic to a website and assist in converting that traffic into sales. Here is a snap shot of some of these elements.

Selecting the right Keywords

All good SEO campaigns start with good keyword research. The reason being, selecting and then targeting the right keywords is essential to the ultimate success of an SEO campaign. If you road worthy inspection services and are based in Melbourne, then you will want to ensure that your website is ranking for phrases related to road worthy inspections in Melbourne. If you get your keyword targetting wrong, then you have essentially blown the enitre campaign, as you wont get the targeted, qualified visitors to want. This is why keyword research is critical, to ensure your site is optimised for the highest and most frequently searched terms/keywords that relate to your business.

Good Copywriting

You have only won half the battle if you have managed to get traffic (potential customers) to your website. Now you’ve got to convince them to buy. That’s where persuasive copywriting comes in. Make sure you tell people why they need your products or services and include many opportunities for them to buy along the way, dont just leave that option to a few pages within the site, make it easy and make it a stand out point. It’s no secret that search engines like content, so when you are writing content for your website, be mindful of this and optimise it for searcn engines, this will include your keywords, spanning them correctly and listing them just the right amount of times.

Link Building

As it is in young social circles, popularity is key. Link building is a huge online popularity contest, and the search engines favour the popular kids. A website’s success in search engines is tightly linked to, on the amount of relevant incoming links to the site. The best type of links are relevant links, especially if those links also drive qualified eyeballs to your site.

HTML Optimisation

Search engines want to know exactly what each page on your website is about; what a search engine doesn’t want to do is search through code to figure it out. Title tags, header tags, Alt tags, Meta-descriptions - search engines want your site’s HTML to be descriptive and clean.  So, next time you hear us SEO’ers moaning about the importance of clean code you will know what we are on about, and why. 

Measuring Success

The wonderful thing about SEO is that it can be tracked. Unlike advertising budgets spent on TV, Radio, and in print, SEO can be properly tracked and tweaked on the fly. This is why no SEO campaign is complete without analytics and review. After all, if you aren’t measuring things like traffic, link popularity, and conversions, then how do you know if your SEO strategies and allocated budget are working? When analysing an SEO campaign, only make one change at a time so that you know which changes are effective.

So there it is. If you want to have an effective SEO campaign, you will need to include each of the SEO elements listed above. But, please keep in mind the information we have provided above merely scratches the surface on these topics, and there are many other more advanced SEO strategies that can benefit your site as well. These building blocks, however, are the perfect way to get your SEO campaign started on the right track.

Newpath WEB provide free SEO reports for businesses wishing to learn how their site can be improved, and how they can increase sales through their website.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under SEO & Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.