We get lots of people asking us about SEO, what they should do, what they could do and what they definitely should not do. It seems that a lot of 'gurus' and unscrupulous SEO companies have been over-complicating the whole thing unnecessarily and in light of this we have decide to shine a much needed spotlight on the often confusing area of SEO information and misinformation.SEO is not rocket science. Yes, SEO moves fast. Yes, the strategies change periodically, but the simple essence of SEO basically stays the same. A respectable SEO agency will admit SEO is challenging but will explain as much as they can to you simply and will tailor your campaign to your budget.
Don't believe the hype. SEO results don't come quickly. Ethical SEO campaigns can take a considerable amount of time to develop and become effective but it will definitely be worth the wait.
Some SEO companies use the same SEO techniques for every client they work for and claim this is an efficient approach to SEO. This just isn't true. Every business is different and requires a unique SEO campaign. If your SEO campaign is not tailored to the wants and needs of your business, it is highly unlikely to make a difference.
Oh and our favourite...you really need metatags…yeah, if this was 1999. Now you need so much more: social bookmarking, press releases, content syndication, a blog and someone to run it, some viral content as linkbait, and about 500 more good sites linking to yours with your targeted anchor text.
In our experience, SEO is all about understanding our client and their customers, following good practice and utilising a combined understanding of search engines and web technology.
Here's a few tips to get you started:
- Know your market – choose your keywords based upon what people are looking for, NOT the other way around. There are a range of free tools and some paid ones which are perfect for helping you, Google Adwords & Word Tracker are ideal programs for this.
- Clarify your business goal, brand objective and value proposition. These are extremely difficult to do, but essential to your success. Answer these first!
- Solve a problem for your customer. Make sure the page does this with proper SEO and a call to action. It comes down to answering a user's specific question.
- Re-Work & Write your content - If you have already worked on some content think about re-working it to include some of your new keywords but be warned: don’t go over doing it and make sure it still reads well.
- Start a Blog. Blogs are all about content. Search engines love content. They don't love Flash, and they're still struggling with photos and video, but they absolutely get content.
- Get Social. Social Media is a great option of getting quality, inbound traffic.The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.
- Great content + Great User Experience + SEO = Traffic simples!
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