Search Engine Optimization - SEO

High ranking on Google is like having a free salesperson online, all the time

Search Engine Optimization – Why is it important for Your Website?

Google reported in July 2008 to have about 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique pages on the internet. Out of that, Google index contains about 40 billion (40,000,000,000) pages and growing every day. Related to that – it is estimated that more than 1 million new websites are registered every month, which means more than 40,000 each day!

Now imagine your website with its pages of information trying to stand out in this huge collection of websites and pages. How would your potential customers find your product or your service?

SEO ensures first that your site will be indexed by the search engines (and no, it is not that you have created a new site that it will get indexed in a short while; that is – unless you properly introduced it to the search engines), but more importantly ensure that you get ranked to appear as high as possible on the search results (known as SERP: Search Engine Results Page), so your get most of the search volume when searches are conducted for your offerings.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of making a website and the content it contains as relevant as possible for search engines as well as for searchers. SEO includes technical tasks to have the search engines find, crawl and index a site for the relevant keywords, as well as marketing-focused tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases.

SEO process takes into account multiple on-site and off-site factors that should be optimized to get the best rankings on search engines and the best results for your website. In addition to your site’s meta tags, structure, links and so on, special attention is placed on the content itself.

It was (and is) Google that stated “Content is King” and directed the focus of the Internet as we know it today towards good, quality and meaningful content.  Your website’s content is of outmost important for being successful on the search engines. Mind you, “good” does not necessarily mean “a lot”. What it does mean is “compelling”. A shorter landing page is able to drive much more qualified leads and conversions (i.e. the site's goals) than a badly written, long scrolling 100 words page of little value. Likewise, a “scanty” page that says very little and does not tell the visitor what to do next or persuade a buying action is of no use either.

As search engines refine their algorithms and place greater importance on useful, meaningful, well written copy that is SEO-friendly, the savvy Internet Marketing experts like those led by WSI are those that can show results. You can too: Call WSI E-Services today to find out how your Web copy can be polished up as part of your SEO strategy to drive good results on Google and other search engines and bring quality conversions.

It is important to note that any site should be ranked high and get targeted traffic not (only) by searching on the company’s name or the site’s address, but for the products and/or services the company is offering. Otherwise – unless you are a big brand that online users are searching by its name – being found on the search engines’ results page when looking for your name is nothing more than another business card online and does not fulfill your marketing and business goals.

How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?

Crawler based search engines, such as Google, "crawl" the Web by means of a "Web spider". The spider is a powerful computer program that accesses thousands of Web pages and records what it finds. It possesses a level of intelligence, allowing it to make fairly sophisticated judgments on relevancy and store the information in its database. When you search one of these systems, you're actually searching the records in the spider's database.

Those crawlers aim to show the most relevant results for the search query a user had made. Due to that, they are running a highly sophisticated algorithm that calculates hundreds of factors that adds up to a “relevancy score”. Those algorithms are never published but best practices, alliances with the search engines and experience are the way to learn what it takes to make a web page relevant for a certain search query, obviously taking into account the competition as well. The reason that those algorithms are a secret is also why no one can ensure a certain ranking on the natural search engines results page...

The spiders operate constantly on the Web. Once your site is on a spiders list, it will receive periodic re-visits, and so any changes to your site will get recorded on the search engines. Page titles, body text and other elements all play a role in how the page is given relevancy.

Crawler Based Search Engines Use the Spiders To Do Three Things: 

It visits the Web page
It then follows links to other pages within the site
It then returns to the site on a regular basis to identify site changes

The information the spider finds goes into the "index". The index is a huge electronic list containing a copy of every Web page that the spider finds. If a website changes, the index is updated with the new information. These updates can take a while sometimes. The time between being “spidered” and indexed can be several months, unless the proper steps are taken to “help” the search engine index your site sooner.

How to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website

Driving traffic is only part of what professional SEO should do. Getting even thousands of visitors to your website might be the wrong goal (and result) if those visitors are looking for something else and got to your website by mistake. This is as if your salespeople would have called the wrong potential customers every day.

Successful SEO starts always with the proper analysis of your business. Following this analysis, an indepth analysis of your industry and competitors is also required;. The goal is to drive more targeted traffic to your website, meaning – your potential customers; those that are looking actively for your products and/or services.

Getting to the first page of the search engine takes work. It is not enough to design and build the best looking site. There are products and/or services. SEO is the result of optimizing those elements in the best possible way to create a “Search Engine Friendly Site”, and ongoing monitoring and optimization to make sure progress is achieved and the position compared to your competition is as it should be. The bottom line for you is more targeted traffic, leading to more potential customers, leading to more sales and profit. 

SEO and PPC: The Best for Successful Search Engine Marketing Strategy

The best Search Engine Marketing strategy is to combine SEO with PPC.  There are factors that will dictate a preference of SEO over PPC and others that will make more sense to prefer Pay per Click of Search Engine Optimization. However, there are multiple advantages to use both tactics together in order to achieve the best synergy.

To pick only one example: a web page that was properly optimized as part of your SEO plan, will help to take your Quality Score on Google up which will result in reducing you PPC costs.
 
SEO should be preferred over PPC when the following considerations are valid (see our corresponding PPC page for the factors to prefer Pay per Click):

You have a brand new website
Budget is more important than time
You are changing or adding or deleting a big portion of pages from you site
You are introducing major structure changes to your site
Your site content is not rich enough
Your website might have poor conversion architecture

Combining both SEO and PPC together will give you the best of both worlds and increases your chances for having a truly successful Search Engine Marketing campaign.  However, getting success with Search Engine Optimization is crucial for success in the long run – where it matters. One way is to look at it is your PPC as your hard-core sales and your SEO as your Marketing.

Contact us to discuss a strategy that is aimed at continued results and high Return-on-Investment for your online marketing investment and your business as a whole.

Successful Search Engine Optimization – WSI Approach

What is it that your business needs to market effectively online and enhance your revenues significantly?
Where is your business today and where it is heading?

Those are just a couple of questions WSI E-Services ask when starting a SEO project.
Your SEO campaign will be constructed from several steps or phases that are designed to ensure results. With the vast customer base of WSI and with our strategic partners, we are able to constantly test this process as one that drives results to our customers and make them see return on their investment.

Our professional SEO service contains the following phases:

• Information Architecture Brief – analysis of your business, goals and website

• Initial Optimization project

• Site evaluation

• Competitive Intelligence analysis

• Keyword research and analysis

• Initial Site optimization (on-site elements)

• Website structure, architecture and content

• Submission to major search engines

 

• SEO Monitoring and Maintenance

• Ongoing site monitoring and incremental changes needed to improve ranking.

• Review and analysis of site analytics.

• Ongoing directory submissions.

• Ongoing article and news release optimization & submissions

• Ongoing creation and submission of custom Google Sitemaps.

 

• Ongoing Monitoring

 

• Maintenance and continuous optimization

• Reporting

 

 

To help you move your business to the next level, WSI E-Services can provide you with a comprehensive mix of Search Engine Marketing and Internet Marketing tools and techniques.

In addition, consider to combine your SEO strategy with Pay per Click and Social Media Optimization to make the most out of your online presence. Read on our Web Design to ensure that your website also converts the traffic you drove into customers.

Contact us and we will be more than glad to construct the strategy that meet your specific needs.