Howard White | | Why do you need SEO?
Ever imagined of owning a shop of your own? A book shop perhaps? The perfect little shop; mixture of new age and old; of class and necessity; a collage of whatever you have ever dreamed of. It can be the perfect place, with perfect books, all categorized according to the way you like. You have also omitted all the flaws you have noticed earlier in others’ shops. What is stopping your business from booming?
Lack of proper marketing/publicity!
So why do you need SEO? You may have the best hosting service, the best layout, the best content, but there is a big “but” in there. You need to make the World Wide Web aware of your existence. Now naturally, you cannot go around sending emails to all your contacts and their contacts, spamming their mail folders with the good news that you too are one proud owner of a brand new site. That is a bad marketing move.
Maybe you know people who have had sites since the 90s, and they totally disagree with the notion of needing seo for a site. Since they didn’t do anything and are still doing well, why do you need seo? Why give in to Google’s whims now when they were there well before 1998. Please do consider the number of internet users then. Today as of December 2007, we have 1.319 billion internet users, and some 15-200 million websites, depending upon the definition of the websites. Everyone who can write and use the internet has a site today.
With 7 million pages sprouting up every need, there is ‘some’ competition out there.
The keyword “bookstore” yields 68,500,000 sites, where does your site stand? That is exactly what an SEO service does, bringing your site on the 1st or 2nd SERP against powerful keywords so that browsers looking for you can find you.
Sure you know all about page ranks and key words and unique content now, but do you know how to go about it? The best thing about SEO is that it is like an investment that will give you ROI forever. If you optimize your site for a keyword, it will still turn up for that phrase years from today, and will result in genuine leads. To cut a long story short, you will need the following
 A Keyword Research - This involves a good deal of SEM research and a detailed analysis of the sites target audience as well as the products being offered.
Text Formulation - This is where the keywords are used. Sensible content is written with these words, keeping the KEI and keyword density in mind, in order to steer clear of stuffy content.
Optimization of Meta tags, Heading tags and Images - Short yet beneficial statements are used keeping the sites’ motive in mind, and avoiding excessive use of keywords. The heading tag needs to be explicative, including the keyword phrases. Images will have to be tagged to make them search engine crawlable.
Link Building - In Link Building, quality of the links matters a lot, and negative co-citation can kill your site. Link baiting should abide by White Hat SEO rules.
The HTML - The code needs to be clean and cleared for validation of the page as well as working in browsers like Mozilla and IE6..
Web 2.0 - This involves postings in forums, blogging, community building etc. Direct feedback from the browsers in this strategy make it the most effective marketing survey tool, with the site catering to the needs and demands of its potential customers.
Finally Client Experience and Loyalty - The end-result is a long-lasting, consumer-satisfying and trust-worthy relationship between the consumer and the site.
|
You are already doing a customized version of SEO, by writing good content, choosing relevant keywords and unique tags. However, for the rest, you will have to resort to a different strategy altogether. How can you get your site indexed on page 1 or 2 of SERP? There must be some difference between an SEO consultant and your approach. Why risk being de indexed or banned from Google for doing something you don’t even know completely.
Your so-called friends may advise you to go for conventional strategies like email-marketing, or maybe adsense or ppc. These methods are good and to some extent a novice can try them, but this will get you random visitors, who are probably looking for clothes and came across your site on books. They would not be interested and will move on. You will have clicks but no business. SEO is all about bringing you the targeted audience, who was looking for you in the first place.
Professional SEO services are for you if you want your business to stay in the run and compete with the 200 million minus 1 sites.
Private Reply to Howard White |
