Marketing your company with SEO
Once the world wide web was seen as a place of few rules and of little importance to the real world. Those wild west days have dissappeared, the internet has matured and we have come to regard the web as quite an important cog in the machinery of our day to day lives.
From a business perspective, the internet is now vital for the branding and marketing of a company. Few companies have the luxury of ignoring the web and the business opportunities it can offer.
Having a nice website is one thing but having a website that catches a hat full of relevant visitors every day should be the real aim. That is where the mysterious world of SEO comes in to play. SEO (search engine optimisation) is shrouded in geek speak but in essence it’s simple: When a person wants to find something using the internet they will type that something into a search engine and look through the results. More often than not they’ll use Google, which is by far the most popular of the search engines. SEO is the process of getting your website listed in the top 10 search results for a specific keyphrase.
If you want your website to appear in the top 10 listing for a given keyphrase you have two choices:
You could spend your marketing budget on a Google Advertising campaign. Ensuring your appearance on their paid advertising sections. However, this isn’t cheap and it ain’t getting any cheaper: Google’s paid ad revenue is continuing to rise despite this tough climate (24% rise in revenue from the previous year. That’s from $3.39 billion to $4.22 billion. Not bad ).
Or you could try your hand at SEO. You need to do your homework first and investigate which keyphrases you should be targeting. There is no point in targeting a keyphrase that no one actually looks for – if you do this, the only traffic you’ll get will be the clicks you make checking that you’re still top for that keyphrase!
Once you’ve selected a good handful of phrases, you’ll need to thread these into the fabric of your website. Title tags, description tags, header tags, alt tags, links and content should all contain a sprinkling of keyphrases. Make sure the titles and descriptions are different for all the pages of your site but don’t just stuff them with keywords – make them meaningful and user friendly.
The next step is building backlinks – links to your site from other sites. You need these and you’re going to need quite a few. A mixture of quality and quantity seems to be the way forward. Although keep away from any sites that Google doesn’t like.
Don’t expect instant results. You have to be gentle with Google, as she spooks easily and it takes a long time to build her trust.
For a new site, don’t expect to see any results for 3 to 6 months. The full benefit of your hard work can take up to a year and beyond to materialise.
