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Author: Ben McKay (SEO) Date: 16 Oct 2009 Categories: Other articles Web design articles To help respond to a few FAQs about SEO (search engine optimisation), we thought it might be helpful to provide a little bit of coverage on a few considerations in the SEO process. Perhaps the best place to start is to describe exactly what SEO is and what it isn’t. What SEO is not... As there is so much confusion over what SEO is, I thought I would begin with what SEO is not...
What SEO is...
The value of SEO It’s been suggested in the past that SEO is a form of magic - the kind of magic where people are selling guaranteed #1 rankings for £100. In reality this is almost certainly unlikely. So although the value looks enticing, we’ll be blunt: these types of offers are a waste of time. SEO is not about cheap tricks: it is knowledge and activity that can be applied to a business’ presence online and impact its return on investment. Having a website is not enough. Promoting it in the search results is a must!
The true gains of SEO are in its continued value-adding approach. Not a one-off, single SEO purge. The real results occur from ongoing attention from multiple business functions.
The value of SEO can be seen:
What are the outputs of SEO activity? There are potentially infinite outputs of SEO, depending on the breadth of your definition. Typical outputs of SEO include adding value to a company’s online assets on an ongoing basis. These typically break down into three areas:
What does SEO cost? As a result of the scalability of different functions of SEO, you can quite literally say that you can pay what you wish to pay, but for most businesses there is a saturation point or an optimal rate. This might factor in capacity to serve increasing customers, expenditure elsewhere, overall marketing budgets, business culture, other more immediate targets that need to be met, and many more. Here are a few explanations of the costs of SEO....
SME SEO with small budgets If only limited budgets are available at this time, a consultation process of your business and its digital landscape and opportunities might be more suitable. That way the SEO consultant can work with the in-house marketing personnel to extract the best opportunities at the least expense and resource.
SEO with more typical marketing budgets If more typical market budgets are available to invest in the optimisation of a website in its niche, then this can be used to realign the site’s intent, structure and keyword usage. It might also begin to look at offsite SEO opportunities available in that site’s online industry.
SEO as part of the web design process
SEO can play a very important role as part of the website design and development process. Search engine optimisation is more than keywords now and as much about structures, organisation and the way your website communicates the priorities of these keywords.
SEO, as part of the website development process, is frequently focussed on analysing the structures of keywords within topics, and analysing things like their intent, their relationships to each other and importantly their competiveness with the website’s niche. (Naturally, websites can’t all rank for all the terms they want).
Ongoing SEO: link-building, social media activity, digital PR This is the most obviously scalable SEO activity whereby offsite activity intends to increase the number, quality and relevancy of inbounds links to a website. But this link-building activity might actually be borne as a bi-product of another activity. A good SEO consultant does their best to infiltrate every marketing channel for maximum visibility in the search results.
Clear and Transparent SEO Prices If you are interested in getting a SEO quote, make sure you share as many details as you can about your online business – it helps us dig out the opportunities for building the strength and visibility of your website.
The wrap up....
But this is certainly all there is to SEO, and I intend to write another piece breaking down the activity in more detail. If you do have any queries though, feel free to contact us with your queries!
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