Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short) is an important way to maximise your website’s and therefore your businesses presence on the internet. Sometimes called natural or non-paid search, these days it involves a number of methods to ensure your website rises up the search engine rankings.
It used to mean using relevant keywords around your website and in third party articles. When people typed these keywords into Google, your website (or an article linking to your website) would appear in their list of searches. The higher up your website showed in the rankings due to targeted keywords, the more people would click on your site.
The SEO results were then measured by ranking reports and high performing keywords that resulted in many click throughs and conversions were used again, where as low performing keywords were paused or removed.
In 2012 however, gone are the days when SEO means using keywords and measuring results by ranking report alone. Now the success of a campaign can be boosted and analysed more successfully and in much more detail.
Ways to measure and improve SEO now include analysing link building, web analytics reports, using branded and non-branded keywords, social media, PR, measuring conversion rates and call tracking. Methods like these allow much more detailed and successful SEO management.
An SEO campaign can now even incorporate other non-internet marketing methods, so that measuring the true value of search engine optimisation – or where you website ranks in the search engines – includes both online and offline promotional tools.
For instance PR can be part of offline SEO, you can incorporate the number of mentions in the press into your results. Backlinks produced from PR efforts online can also be measured as part of optimisation.
Online, social media is now a very useful tool to boost your SEO. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are important avenues for increasing your presence on the internet for free. Getting people to improve the search engine ranking of your website by visiting or ‘liking’ it via social media is increasingly important.
Internet marketing done via clever video content on video channels such as YouTube also draws attention to your website and can quickly spread your company name across the internet. Blog content that goes viral can also be taken into account when measuring the success of online search engine optimisation activity.
So remember that successful SEO these days isn’t just about choosing the right keywords and analysing them, there are many other ways to boost your company’s visibility online and measure how well your website is being optimised across the internet and beyond.