Define Optimize
Introduction:
The practice of designing a website in order to maximize traffic from search engines, is most commonly referred to as: SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The aim is to find the highest trafficed keyphrases (that are actually entered into search engines by potential customers) and to ensure that your website ranks as well as possible for each of them.
SEO is really
- Identifying ALL the best keyphrases to optimize your pages for.
- Building pages that target each keyphrases to maximize traffic
- Designing a navigational structure that leverages the keyphrases as effectively as possible
Engines rank a page by looking through their database and returning all the pages that best match the keyphrase entered by the searcher. In order to do that the engine needs to work out what keyphrase each page of your site is focused on. This is what optimization does: it helps the engines to work out what keyphrases your pages are focused on.
Once the engines have located all the pages that ARE focused on a searchers query, they sort (or rank) them according to which of the matching pages are most strongly optimized/focused on the keyphrase. So in a simple world the page most strongly optimized for a given phrase would rank number 1 and therefore be the first result your customer would see.
So identifiying the best keyphrases, and optimizing your pages for them, forms the foundation upon which an effective website is built.
However it is never that simple: once a search engine has ranked all the pages in this way, they then rank them again, based upon how many links (using the same or a related Keyphrase) point at the pages. So the pages that rank at the top of a search engine's results are those that deal most strongly with the topic searched for (the Keyphrase entered) AND also have the most links pointing at them from other websites that deal with the same topic. If you are lucky you may be able to get good traffic as soon as your website is optimized, but you must be aware that you may also have to work on building incoming links to your website to compete effectively in your market.
Keyword Research:
The trick is to cast as wide a net (number of keyphrases) as possible in order to capture the maximum amount of traffic. In order to do that a site has to be built whose structure and pages use all the keywords/phrases possible without negatively impacting usability or confusing the main business objectives of the website.
We find all the keyphrases that potential customers are actually typing into search engines by conducting exhaustive Keyword research using industry standard tools such as: WordTracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com, Nichebot.com or Googles own keyword research tool.
Working Traffic Inc. delivers a Keyword Research Report at the end of this process in the form of a speadsheet that lists every Keyphrase along with how many searches are conducted by customers every day for each phrase and also how many competing websites are optimized for each keyphrase.
Navigation Map
The next step is to use the identified keyphrases to create a navigational structure for your website that shows every page (that needs to be created to target each keyphrase) and how each page can be navigated to and from within the website.
Working Traffic Inc. delivers a graphical map showing the desired hierarchical nature of your website and all the pages within that hierarchy. This is the simplest way to represent the underlying navigational structure of a website and can easily be used by any designer/developer to build your website.
Building the pages
This is where we actually get to work, with your website designer, and build/modify the pages in your site to include the keyphrases we have identified. These keyphrases are inserted in strategic places within each page, such as Title (most important), H1 tags, Visible link text (all other pages in your site should link to each other using the keyphrases the target page is optimized for).
It is important to note that the content created for each page in this phase should be of high enough quality that visitors to the page would feel they were gaining useful information. In other words writing a few junk paragraphs is not going to cut it. This is because if you have much competition the only way you can compete is to have more incoming links to your site than the competition...and the only reason for anyone to link to you is if they think your content is valuable to them or their visitors
Evaluation:
About 1 month after the site is built/optimized the engines should have indexed all your new pages (added them to their database) we can then start to see where you are ranking for each keyphrase.
This is where we decide whether or not you need to get incoming links to your site in order to compete, and this is where the quality of your content really counts.
If you do need incoming links, WorkingTraffic will identify directories, forums and blogs that cater to your market. We will also advise on how to leverage online press releases to get incoming links to your website.
Only reputable resources and online PR firms that are really providing a good service to their customers will be selected. Getting links from rubbish sites is no help at all and getting links from "dodgy" sites may actually reduce your ranking with the search engines.
It is the quantity and quality of all inbound links that Google and other major search engines use to judge how useful your site is, and therefore how high to rank it in comparison to other competing sites optimized for the same keywords.
Remember, you can never have too many incoming links as each one either increases your ranking, makes your existing positions safer and less likely to fluctuate (as competitors work on their sites and new players enter the market) and of course each link is yet another potential stream of targeted traffic from the referring website.
Summary:
As you can see SEO done thoroughly is not a "quick fix" kind of job but rather an ongoing process, especially if you have strong enough competition (which means enough sites optimized well enough for the same keyphrases as you).
The best way to look at SEO is that it WILL increase your traffic, how much it will increase is dependant upon all the factors discussed above and how well optimization is performed.
The really great thing about SEO is that every web page that is optimized for a specific keyphrase is actually a trickle, stream or flood of traffic (depending upon how many searches are done). So once you build the page you will continue to get traffic for it as long as that page remains online, this makes SEO one of the most cost effective means of generating new business that is available to companies today.
So there it is in an oversimplified nutshell. However you now probably have a better understanding of the ground work behind SEO than most, which should be a help whatever course of action you decide on, even if it is evaluating another Search Marketing organization.