Demystifying SEO

What is SEO ? How to draw traffic to your site ?

SEO is the method used to achieve visibility on a search engine result organically (without any paid search). The focus of SEO is to gain a high position in the web search, enabling customers to find results and achieve better than competitors. During search we gain valuable information about customers for example which segment the user belongs, the place of the user, his/her priority, product liking and purchase mode online or offline. A well-defined SEO strategy helps to understand more about the customer and outbids or outperforms the competitor for the words you want to be found.

The SEO process is of 4 iterative steps

a) Goal Setting – At the beginning of the month or quarter we set the business goals from the business perspective this could be -Increased click through, Increased engagement and increased conversion. From the brand perspective this could be – increased brand visibility, reputation and competitive advantage.

b) On Page Optimization – The process of refining the website so that your website will be indexed and ranked higher in the search engine. There are few key elements that need to be configured:

 1) Keyword Optimization – Matching the website words /phrases after brainstorming to include the commonly searched keywords using tools like Google Adwords, Google Insights, Wordtracker, SEObook, Wordstream

2) ALT Tag – this is used to specify the alternative text for example when an image cannot be rendered to enable better accessibility in all platforms.

3) Content Balance – There need to be an optimum keyword density-% of time a phrase appears on a page in relation to the total number of words

4) Meta Tags – A HTML element that provides information about the page , meta Title, meta description these need to be configured

5) URLs – using hyphen to separate the URL keywords

6) Site Map – On site optimization page linking all other pages tools FreeSitemapGenerator can be used

7) Web Master tools – This can be used to index a website and allow website owners to see how search engines interact with their site.

c) Off Page Optimization – The objective here is to increase the ranking of your webpage. The ranking is the position of the website in search results based on the number and quality of all websites that link to your page. The key element here is link building. This can be built in two types Inbound and internal. The inbound link is usually from the other website to this page and internal link is from one internal webpage to another webpage. The higher the quality of the linking website the greater this will influence the rank.

d) Analysis and Iteration – Various analytics tools used can track the traffic coming to your webpage common ones include Google Analytics, Stat Counter, Omniture, Various tools like Woorank, FeedtheBot are also good tools to review your SEO . Various criteria for the analysis are usually taken in account like Traffic from each keyword, Conversions from each keyword, technical completeness, website above ours, technical completeness etc. These analysis need to happen every monthly and weekly measuring website performance against baseline.

    While SEO is the natural way to increase traffic to your site, it needs to be bourne in mind that this requires lot of effort and time. Usually 3-4 months minimum effort can get your site with original content up the google ranking, however many of us may not like waiting that long, so in that case we need to refer to PPC and other paid models to engage with your customer much faster.