Search engine optimization techniques

Search Engine Optimization

There are two basic elements to a successful Search Engine Optimization campaign – and understanding of your business and an understanding of the web. At first glance of course the above statement seems pretty obvious. But like all obvious statements it actually encapsulates a grain of truth not often properly acted on by the people that need to understand it. So, let's have a closer look. A Search Engine Optimization company has to understand your business like you do, in order to develop a campaign that works to push your website into the right market sector of the target audience. But it also has to help you understand your own expectations for the web – and (and this is the really important bit) help you modify those expectations to fall in line with the way the web actually works.

Bottom line: Search Engine Optimization companies know what is feasible on the web, and you know what your business does. Those two things have to dovetail properly in order for your online marketing campaign to work with any degree of success.
The SEO company starts by talking to you about what you do. It looks to get a thorough understanding of your market and the available niches. Then it translates that understanding into practical Search Engine Optimization techniques, which – sorry, but it's true – you may not always understand, or which you may even think you don't want.

A prime example of this is keyword selection. Most businesses want to optimize their sites for the most popular keywords. They think, quite naturally, that if millions of people search for the term "running shoes" (and they make running shoes) then optimizing for that term will expose their site to the millions of searchers. It won't, but it isn't the place of a running shoe retailer to understand that.

It is, though, the place of a Search Engine Optimization company to understand that – and then to make the running shoe retailer understand it too, because optimizing for the most popular keywords is like entering the Lottery. The chances against it "being you" (to steal a phrase from the Lottery's old ad campaigns) are massive.

If you optimize instead for a keyword that is much more specific to your business (adding a geographic indicator is one very common way of narrowing your market field down to a niche) then you are way more likely to come out on top. "Running Shoes Dorchester" is a much better keyword for a Dorchester based running shoe retailer. They'll only get Dorchester based queries, which is a much smaller number than global queries – but they'll get nearly all of them instead of hardly any.

The Search Engine Optimization companies knows this already. Its job is to make you understand it so it can drive your campaign down genuinely fruitful avenues.