ALERT: beware of snake-oil salesmen,
seo isn’t something you should leave to chance

Tony, our office Goldfish knows what a meta tag is but does that make him an SEO expert? We think not.. but he is clever. Without being dramatic, success or failure can hinge of the performance of your SEO and so it’s best to get it right, first time.

What is SEO exactly?

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is a broad term that describes the steps required to improve a site’s ranking in the natural search results. It can be divided into four specific areas:

• Content – should be unique and specific to allow search engines to associate the site with relevant keywords.
• Architecture – site coding and performance, structure and navigation should be implemented in a way that allows search engines to navigate and understand the site.
• Link popularity – relevant inbound links in order to develop trust within the search engines and reinforce the site’s association with specific topics and keywords.
• Online buzz – how is your website cited in the social media world e.g. social bookmarks, Tweets etc.

SEO past

SEO has had an interesting history and the the early days consisted of high keyword densities and reverse engineering Altavista and Yahoo’s algorithms. The appearance of paid-search, affiliate programs, user generated content and social media have all played their part in moving SEO to where it is today.

SEO today

2010 and onwards is an exciting time for search engine optimisation and there will be significant impact the SEO landscape as we currently know it. Google recently rolled out personalised search to all users (not just to those who signed up), which essentially made ranking reports obsolete in one foul swoop as users will see different results tailored around their behaviour and preferences. Result pages are also influenced by real-time search results which was originally introduce by Bing who began incorporating Twitter data into search results. Universal search, where mixed results are shown from a variety of sources like images, videos, news and real time data together with natural listings, is also likely to take traffic away from the traditional destination sites.

The key to a successful SEO campaign

Search engine optimisation has evolved significantly over the last years and now great content, on page optimisation and inbound links are more or less standard disciplines for most websites. Today, a successful SEO campaign consists of many more factors than SEO of past and the following elements of a site have to be reviewed as part of the SEO process:

• Hosting and domains
• Indexability and accessibility
• HTML and site structure
• Navigation structure and link equity
• Content presentation, prominence and update frequency
• Duplicate content and canonical issues
• Page title and descriptions (call to action) within the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s)
• Keyword and page conversion analysis
• Online “buzz” (Occurrences in social media)
• Site performance and quality control

Conversion Factors

Our services go beyond classical search engine optimisation and include disciplines such as usability, conversion improvement and social media. As part of the review process, we also examine analytics data beyond just rankings and these can help determine how the following factors are influencing conversion rates:

• Call to action elements
• The user journey
• Heatmaps
• A/B testing
• Conversion funnel
• Usability
• Error handling

Contact us today if you would like to speak about SEO.