SEO Best Practices

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay per click), and the various other means of increasing the visibility of your business online; At the end of the day, your online marketing is actually a combination of all of these.

The internet has already taken over so many offline activities; we are almost doing everything online. There is hardly any business that does not have an online presence. It is no longer something that a business considers but by default builds the online marketing activity into its marketing campaign.

Out of all of these activities, SEO is certainly an activity which is ongoing. The initial effort towards optimizing a website for search engines and visitors is immense, but once the major effort has been put in, it does not require the same kind of mammoth effort; what is required is the ongoing work so that you can keep up and ahead of your competition.

PPC can be used to quickly get relevant visitors, once the SEO work starts to show results, PPC can be tapered off. This of course depends upon the marketing strategy that a business employs.

So what do marketers do on an ongoing basis to ensure that their websites keep ranking well, and the traffic to their web site keeps growing?

One thing is to keep a close watch at the web analytics report, that tells marketers almost everything , and much more about the health of the website. They can find information that can be used to better the user’s experience during their visit. This is one of the ongoing things that every webmaster needs to do.

Besides this, in my earlier article we discussed how a newly launched website can get more relevant traffic and sales by tying up with online coupon sites.

These coupon sites already enjoy a good numbers of visitors because of the attractive discounts they offer. Getting into a contract with such sites will help any business new or existing in many ways:-

1. This is your chance to showcase your service and product; you have a customer walking into your store for a product or service. By providing your best service to the customer, the customer might end up buying more products or even secure another appointment with you.

2. A satisfied customer will go back and spread the good word. The best part is, the amount of goodwill this will create for you, not only will you gain a customer; you will now have a satisfied customer talking about your services!

3. Some customers might write good reviews about your service/products; even better for you.

The idea after is to get relevant visitors to your store, to try out your products and services and then to make them your loyal customer.

The basic strategy should be to combine SEO and some more online marketing strategy in such a way that they work together to bring in the desired results.

Once you get an idea of which services are the most popular, you can introduce a new section in your website regarding that particular product/service. This will be a fresh content for your website; thus helping your SEO efforts.

You can run a short term PPC campaign on the selected products and services in order to maximize traffic.

Make a noise about it in your home page, link this section from every page and get as many visitors as possible engaged in that section.

Get a Press Release done on your products and services and get it published across all new sites.

All these combined activities will not only help in getting your SEO rankings up, it will fulfill your ultimate aim, higher conversions.

Now isn’t this a wonderful amalgamation of the various online marketing strategies?

To best explain the evolution of websites, web site design, and SEO, I will divide this article into three phases-

Phase I- The Bygone era of website design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In the 90s when the internet started to get popular in terms of businesses starting to have a presence on the internet; I remember, it still took a lot of convincing for many businesses, especially small business owners to consider having an online presence. Back then, having an online presence was mostly like displaying a brochure online.  Many of these online businesses would put up their brochures online. That’s it. From the design perspective, businesses would not want to spend much on designing. Sometimes the whole page would be a huge image, sometimes just a few lines of text with contact numbers and an email id. Only a few businesses would perhaps have a full fledged website. As far as Search engine optimization goes, the maximum that Search Engine Optimizers (SEO was coming into being then and there weren’t really that many people doing SEO) could do was to provide titles, descriptions, and keyword Meta tags, and suggest the sites to search engines and search directories. The part that I liked back then is the ease with which web sites could rank with a relevant keyword; understandable since there were hardly that many sites competing, and SEO was even rarer!

Here, I will draw an analogy with constructing a home or building. We need a house, we do not have a house …so what do we do?

We construct a basic, very functional house; it serves the purpose, but is not really visually appealing. It’s just that; a house with rooms and walls to serve a purpose. I guess there wasn’t time or the need to mull over the finer aspects like making it attractive, it has to be constructed, and so be it.

Phase II- The evolving era of website designing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With the availabilty of better tools, and more service providers coming into the field, the internet got a big boost, a new era of web designers were born, they design really beautiful web sites, with frames, with animations, flash, etc. But are these sites user friendly? Can people get to these sites? Do these sites download fast? Are they accessible?
From the SEO perspective, many search engines could not index such websites, because of heavy applications and images, websites took ages to download. That took away the patience of the visitors as well. We created beautiful websites but not many could find them! Finally when they did, they could not find everything on the site!

Again, if we draw an analogy with constructing a building, we construct beautiful home, spend huge amount of money to make it look beautiful, but are these homes safe, practical, and functional too?

Phase III -The new generation of web sites, website designers, and Search Engine Optimizers

We have a new generation of web designers who are familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) nuances, they design keeping in mind various factors so that the end result is a perfect balance beauty and functionality. Striking this cord of course is not easy, one has to test and test and test constantly.

The point that is evident today is that we will see designers, developers, and Search Engine Optimizers work together. Today, almost everyone who has access to the internet has either shopped online, has downloaded eBooks, bought tickets, and much more. Websites are getting better and better, search engines results are very relevant these days.

And again, drawing an anology with constructing buildings; we have multi storied complexes that are functional and yet are not bad looking. A good amount of time is spent on planning and ensuring that there is a perfect marriage of beauty and functionality. The buildings are modern, eco friendly, and user friendly. Interesting!

Designing will continue to evolve and so will SEO, but they have to go hand in hand in order to provide the best to the end users. In summary, website designing has evolved into a creative science, creating website’s that are user friendly, good looking, and SEO friendly too!

For more on SEO and Website design, you can also check out this article on SEO and best practices for Website Designing that I wrote some time back.

Yesterday while going through and validating  comments on my blog, I found a comment that made me stop and pay attention.

The comment was somthing like …Hey I remember i had seen this website before… This guy made a exact copy of your site. Or possible this is also your site? http://www.xyz.org (actual web site has been replaced by xyz)

After reading this comment, naturally I wanted to visit this site which was supposed be an exact same copy of my site.

After clicking on the link, it took quite a bit of time for the website to get displayed. It was one of those sales letter kind of site promising increased traffic to your website.This whole exercise was to get a visitor on their site and buy their service.

I clicked out of the site as fact as possible, not because it was not worth looking at but because of the way they got me in there.

My question is how successful are these web sites?

I will never go back there but perhaps they might entice a few who might want to try their service.

Speaking strictly for me, I would rather go with a marketing message that culminates into a service that rings true with what was promised.

Thoughts…Opinions?

I was recently asked this question.
Though often talked about, I thought it still might be a good idea to write about authoritative sites and what they mean in terms of online marketing/ SEO.

—»Simply put, an authoritative site (or an authority site) is a site that has an authority over a subject or upon various topics.

• Who decides the authority factor?

»I would say, an authoritative site’s performance, in terms of unique content, user experience, among other things, is the deciding factor.An authoritative site does not happen in one day. It takes a lot of effort and time to get to that stage.

Say, you have a question or a query or you wish to know about something, what do you do?

Besides asking people or checking out books for information, usually we Google our query or keyword/ keyphrase, or use any other search engine, and click on the most likely site from among the list of sites that show up on the SERPs.

Perhaps, the web page you click on the first time does not answer your query, what do you do?

You go to the next best page and so on…till you get your answer. Not only does the answer have to satisfy you, it would definitely help, if you can get some more relevant information from that site.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could stumble upon a website that offers just that! A website that is a mine of information and has extensive information on almost every relevant topic that you can think of!

The site would also reference other relevant sites, in case you wish to find out more about subjects related to it. That is what I call a complete site. Not only does it quench the visitor’s thirst for information but it also referes the visitor to other relevant sites. I would not want to lose such a site and would most definitely bookmark this site for future reference. The user experience combined with the extensive precious correct information is what makes a site authoritative.

Some of the most popular authoritative sites are -

Wikipedia, About,  and many edu domain sites. What is common between them? They have original unique content and about thousands and thousands of pages of unique content. They are referred by thousand of sites. They are any searchers delight and they fulfill almost every requirement. They are user friendly, they have interactive sections such as forums, blogs etc. Almost all of these websites have been in existence for years and they do not have any spamming background.

If terms of SEO or Internet marketing, it is really beneficial to get a link from these sites. A one way backlink from authority sites will definitely help your site get noticed by users and search engines, and increase traffic to your site. But these sites are extremely choosy. They maintain high standards and do not compromise on any factors.

If your website boasts of unique content that gets updated very often and has good traffic, you might get links from various sources and with time from authoritative site. Just keep up the hard work. Who knows, some day your site might warrant the same amount of respect as the ‘authoritative sites’ and become an authority too!