SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. It is literally the art of manipulating and modifying your website and a number of external resources to improve the ‘ranking’ of your website in the major search engines. 

Like many forms of advertising and marketing, SEO is always regarded as a work in progress. Even after you have reached your initial goals, whatever they may be, Search Engine Optimisation strategies still need to be carried out as your competition are literally only one step behind, and a lapse in active work to maintain and improve your rankings will often see you losing ground and potential customers to your competition. 

What’s actually involved?

The first and most important step in SEO is keyword selection, without a strong foundation to build on reaching your end goals will become near impossible. 

You SEO account manager will ask you a number of seemingly straight forward questions, try and answer these as truthfully and comprehensively as possible. Your account manager will not know the specifics of your business and it is essential that they know who is your ideal client, best performing product and overall goals for your SEO campaign. 

Once you provide comprehensive answers to the SEO account manager’s questions they will undertake significant research on your market including the following: 

• Identify high volume keywords 

• Identify potential competitors 

• Identify competitors’ current SEO strategy (if any) 

• Identify keywords that are attainable under the SEO plan you purchased 

• Identify keywords likely to end in a ‘sale’ or ‘lead’ for your business 

Once your SEO manager has completed the above they will contact you with a list of recommended keywords for your campaign. You can opt to agree to work with these keywords or alter them to your liking, remembering that the suggested keywords are compiled based upon the overall search volume they provide and the likelihood that your website will attain sufficient rankings to obtain at least part of those potential customers/clients. 

Once you agree on a set of keywords your SEO campaign manager will identify a suitable strategy based on your market and the SEO package purchased. The majority of work undertaken for your SEO campaign will in fact not be noticeable you.

Less than 15% of the overall work load for an SEO campaign will be undertaken on your website. If the market in which you are competing becomes increasingly difficult or competitive this may reduce to as low as 1%. 

The majority of the work to be undertaken for your campaign to be successful, will be centred on a ‘linking strategy’. Linking strategies vary from niche to niche and client to client, however a link from a 3rd party can be viewed as a ‘vote’.

Similar to an election, the more votes that a website obtains the more important search engines will believe that site to be and hence rank higher in the corresponding search results.

However unlike an election different links carry different weight; links can essentially be placed on a scale from ‘SPAM’, (the lowest form of link and can be dangerous to the overall integrity of a site), all the way to ‘High Authority’ which are often links from news sources, or industry bodies.