Wave Goodbye, Say Hello To SEO!
The confusion some business owners still have over SEO and what works and doesn’t work and the time and the cost of it all! As we move into 2011, the year mobile commerce, iPad apps and the socially engaged web will sort savvy brand leaders from the non-runners, it really is time to wave goodbye, say hello to SEO!
Google looks at and ranks inbound links from quality sites to quality content and frequent activity at your own site. User search behaviour needs to be constantly monitored and website visitor activity tracked and assessed on a non-stop basis.
The core of online marketing is quality link building to create brand identity awareness and drive quality niche traffic, which converts to the intended purpose of your site.
As everybody should know by now, the real secret of SEO is writing content! Fresh, regular organic content, optimised for prevailing, relevant niche search keywords, which together, will confidently encourage human traffic and search engine indexing. Integrating SEO within website pages must happen during the process of an evolving website design build and content creation.
Business owners might assume they are prioritising and ‘saving money’ by thinking they can leave it until after the site is complete. They need to realise that SEO and relevant content is the website! Ranking functionality and visitor usability is the reason a website succeeds, not because of an ‘About Us’ headline declaring your team are “focused with a passion” – whatever that’s supposed to mean to the search visitor.
It simply is never the case that your ‘website is done’ or your ‘SEO is done’, as you frequently hear from business owners who like to forward plan marketing strategies on ever decreasing budgets. The brutal fact of surviving in the eCommerce jungle is if you don’t keep up you die!
Potential customers will not find you or if they have bookmarked you or signed up to receive your once-in-a-blue-moon email marketing newsletter, they will just unsubscribe or drift away if content is not kept fresh, relevant, interesting and valuable.
The process is ongoing and consumer search is a subtly moving and changing animal. The role social media referral, content sharing, customer review and ‘like’ impressions now play in determining your site visibility, credibility and usability is key.
So wave goodbye to old, rigid SEO thinking, and as well as your site page title tags, dynamic URLs, alt text and image headings, say hello to optimising your tweets, blogs, articles, videos and mobile messages.