To be sure SEO and PPC are wonderful ways to drive traffic to your website and more traffic usually means more potential customers. Be advised though that your business might have top notch webpage with all the bells and whistles, and yet do very poorly on the search engines. The reason likely lies within SEO – if your website isn’t optimized it will sit on the internet and very few viewers (if any) will be able to find it. It still has its uses but for all intents and purposes, it likely does little more for you than fill the purpose of a trifold brochure. On the other hand, the search engine optimized website will draw traffic even while you sleep, and from people you don’t know and have no contacts with.

Now, a few things should be remembered. Firstly, there is the price – Catch This! Design tailors its services and SEO packages towards small business owners but that is not always the case. You will find there are a large number of offers for online marketing/SEO/PPC ranging in figures of upwards from four to five thousand dollars. These offers may well be quality goods however, their focus is quite simply too big for an average small business owner, and thus they are too costly to be justified for small business owners.  It is not unreasonable as a small business owner to see a great increase in search engine driven traffic for as little as $500 for the first time implementation of your SEO.

Secondly, it is not uncommon to see “guarantees” of increased traffic and/or performance. This point is not to debunk that claim – the truth of the matter is that any site without SEO will have increased traffic and improved performance once it has been properly optimized. However, nobody can guarantee just how high the increase and improvement will be. This is due to a number of factors outside of your control, namely the nature of the Internet. The internet grows and changes, some websites vanish and new ones appear. There are other non web based factors at play here also, for example the current recession means some people are less inclined to spend money on luxury goods. The time of year also has an impact, periods of summer heat can offers less economic activity, just as prior to Christmas overall shopping activity increases.

Thirdly, SEO, as great as it is, cannot just be left unattended once the website has been optimized. As the internet changes, your website must change with the it. If left unattended your SEO will degrade over time but be aware that degraded outdated SEO still offers more benefit to you than no SEO at all. Leaving SEO unattended is however not a good idea as its impact will be minimized and your website will gradually slip down further and further on the search engine listings. The rule of the thumb is that the potential customer will check the search engine for the first dozen or so listed pages. Slipping under the radar will still retain some marginal benefits for you but it is preferable if you tweak and adjust your SEO on a regular basis.

For more information about our SEO services, and to find out how we can help you take your business to the next level with effective online marketing, please visit us at www.catchthis.ca or email us at info@catchthis.ca

Page Descriptions
The description is what gets displayed by search engines when your site/page comes up in search results. It’s not shown on your actual page, but allows searchers to quickly decide if your site is what they are looking for. Again, it is important to include your strongest keywords in your description for indexing…but yet keep it sensible for the human reader.

The page description of my home pages reads “Catch This! Design provides web design, custom websites, online marketing, web solutions in Okanagan and British Columbia.”

If you read my previous blog post, you might see a pattern. When you compare the page title and page description you’ll notice I have chosen keywords that appear in both. These keywords, and even their placement within the surrounding words are very intentional. Best ranking first, to put it in the simplest of terms.

Page Copy
I can’t stress this enough – your page copy needs to be strong, clear, and effective. For many of our clients this means working with a copywriter. As we all know, it can be a real bear to write about yourself, for yourself – so if this is you, engaging the services of a copywriter is a great way to get things moving forward and freeing yourself up to do other things for your business.

Whether you write your own copy or have someone else take care of it, you’re going to need those well researched and carefully chosen keywords again. While page title, description, and keywords are all hidden in the code, for them to be relevant and of value to the search engine spiders they must appear somewhere in the actual copy on your website.

HINT: Because of the importance of keywords and their relation to site text, websites that are all pictures and no words aren’t helping you! I know that a picture is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately search engine spiders don’t have eyes. The process of implementing good SEO is ultimately a balancing act that needs to take into account the human user and the machine without eyes.

And as if the process of getting your SEO in place doesn’t involve enough work, it’s never done. To truly reap the benefits of SEO you need to then go back and analyze your results every quarter to ensure that the keywords you have in place are performing for you. Being mindful of your keyword density, if there are words that aren’t working for you then it is a good idea to remove or swap them in for new words that will produce stronger results.

Summing things up, SEO requires an ongoing process of research & analysis, and if not done effectively, your keywords may be all wrong. And the keywords you select will be the basis of so much more…

I hope I’ve given you cause to pause a moment for SEO.

(And if you’ve heard that SEO is dying, you might want to reconsider. We too have heard this, but in fact our SEO results show that it does matter. For more on this, you can read Why SEO Will Never Die)

Maybe I given to cause to say “Gee, I need that…but I don’t want to do it! ”

We’ve got an easy solution for you. Our Basic SEO Package allows you to optimize key pages on your site. The service includes research, analysis, and selection of keywords, writing of page titles, page descriptions, and adaptations to copy needed to address these four areas of your web pages.

For more information about our SEO services, and to find out how we can help you take your business to the next level with effective online marketing, please visit us at www.catchthis.ca or email us at info@catchthis.ca.

Of course I don’t want to mislead you. You will get indexed even if you don’t employ any kind of SEO on your site…eventually. And you’ll likely be buried among a bunch of other sites that don’t have SEO.

There are four specific areas of your page that impact organic SEO success.

Keywords & Keyphrases

The point of SEO is not to pick every keyword known to be remotely connected to your business goods or services, and slam it into the coding of your site. (I say it because I’ve seen it done, and it’s not going to get you results.) Once the initial set of keywords is built, an in depth process of analysis and statistics comes into play, whereby the words are assessed to ensure they are being used in their most effective form (singular or plural, hyphenated or unhyphenated, for example), and that they are in fact strong key words to be using for your SEO.

There are limitations on how many keywords can be used to good effect, when optimizing any given page, so it’s important make your choices based on careful consideration and proper research & analysis.

Page Titles

Page titles need to be “keyword rich”… Meaning that the results of your keyword analysis also come into play when writing titles for your pages.

A little clarification might be helpful here…when I say “page title” for SEO I am referring to the title that is shown in the very top of your browser window and not the title you write to go with your copy/content.

The page title of my home page reads “Okanagan, Web Design, Custom Websites, Online Marketing, Web Solutions”

Because I try to keep it short and sweet, I’m going to cut it short there but stick with me, and next week I’ll wrap up all this talk about organic SEO with the other two areas of your page you don’t want to forget when planning website optimization.

For more information about our SEO services, and to find out how we can help you take your business to the next level with effective online marketing, please visit us at www.catchthis.ca or email us at info@catchthis.ca.

Depending on what type of business you are in, much of your website traffic may come as a result of the connections you make personally and through print advertising but don’t forget to make yourself easier to find for the people you don’t actually connect with through traditional methods.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can provide increased website traffic, and an ongoing flow of exposure for your business if properly implemented and maintained.

Good SEO is not something you should assume is included in the building of your site. To be effective SEO needs to be properly researched & implemented by someone who is knowledgeable and experienced in the field of Search Engine Marketing.

To clarify before I go any further, I am referring to “Organic SEO”, as opposed to “Pay Per Click” advertising. And in most basic terms, having your site SEO’d allows you to tell the search engines how you would like your site to be indexed, rather than letting the search engine spiders rank you strictly according to their generalized formulas. Search engine indexing, when left to it’s own devices will often bury your page somewhere among the millions of others. Where? Without SEO it’s anyone’s guess!

Search engine spiders index and rank your pages based upon their own algorithms and a combination of specific page elements. The best way to get solid SEO results is to make sure you cover all of your bases, and tie the results of in-depth keyword research into the writing of page titles, descriptions, and copy.

Tune in next week for more detail on the four specific areas of your webpage(s) that you want to make sure are included in your SEO efforts.

For more information about our SEO services, and to find out how we can help you take your business to the next level with effective online marketing, please visit us at www.catchthis.ca or email us at info@catchthis.ca.