Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not about technology or ‘bits and bytes’.  It is a new business generation (i.e. marketing) activity that should be considered from the following standpoints:

• Project Management
• Strategic Marketing
• Executive decision-making

For SEO success, at a minimum, consider the following important areas:

1. Getting started with Search Engine Optimisation: Achievable objectives

Generally, the primary motivation behind most SEO campaigns is to generate ‘free’ traffic to a website or web property. However, there is a major misunderstanding: SEO costs money – whether you employ in-house expertise or external consultants. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, if you are seeking the cheapest form of online advertising, relative to result, Google PPC advertising may be a better way forward.

The highly competitive SEO environment makes it difficult to get mainstream keywords ranked highly within the search results of popular search engines. For example, ‘cheap holidays’ is heavily subscribed. There are several thousand (Google suggests ~140,000) websites competing to rank highly for popular keywords such as these, and many of them have extensive know-how and funding at their disposal. To stand a chance of ranking highly and generating significant website visitors, new entrants need to:

• Do better at what heavily armed competitors are already doing
• Exercise intelligence both before getting started and throughout the projects

When ranking websites, many factors are considered by search engines. Some factors, such as the age of the website and its content, cannot be manipulated by SEO experts. This can create competitive advantage for established websites.

Often, companies do not know what to expect from SEO – which is one reason why objectives are not realistically set. Reading the content of this site (and browsing related websites) will help you to ascertain what you can realistically achieve within your budgetary constraints.

Clearly working out the target audience that you need to talk with is essential. Otherwise it’s very unlikely that anything of lasting value can be achieved. Once your audience is established (and documented in detail), an understanding is required of what the target audience is searching for, and the search keywords that will be used. This can quite different to the way a business describes its own products or service.

SEO needs to be based on the way anticipated consumers/clients view and use a product/service and their desired outcomes, not necessarily a product’s/service’s features and benefits. For example, a weight loss product manufacturer should consider ‘weight loss’ or ’lose weight’ as keywords, not the name of its product/company, ‘XYZ Fat Blaster’ or the product’s differentiators (its technical prowess). Note: this is an example only – the suggested keywords are way too mainstream for most businesses to realistically target.

The focus must be on the customers/clients viewpoint and the way they search, not the way a company itself describes its own products and services. Up-to-date customer analysis needs to be available to successfully do this, or alternatively, to understand this perspective, just ask customers! It is also useful to understand the difference between "buying" keywords and "research" keywords: i.e. ‘widgets compared’ and ‘widgets Melbourne overnight delivery’ – the second indicates intent to buy rather than browse.

3. Understand the level of competition

Based on a thorough knowledge of the level of competition for your target keywords, decisions need to be made regarding keyword selection. Importantly, these decisions need to occur at the strategic planning stage, not the implementation phase of an SEO project. It is therefore important to have a clear picture of the level of competition, and the time and effort that you are prepared to commit to fighting for high rankings for these keywords.

Tools and online services are available to establish the level of competition for keywords as well as the number of times that these keywords are entered into search engines. This hard data, along with good background knowledge, is needed to make sensible decisions with regard to keyword selection.

It is vital that a website (and the keywords that it targets) does not attempt to be all things to all people. This will dilute the effects that it’s trying to achieve – none of the keywords will stand out. If you want to target multiple, distinctly different keywords or messages, consider using multiple web properties (URLs) to generate best results.

It can be helpful to think of your SEO capacity as a finite quantity that can only be increased slowly and can only be assigned once to selected keywords. Remember, it is not possible to transfer the ranking of one keyword across to another if you change your mind.
Attempting to chase after too many keywords will create unhelpful keyword competition on your websites pages. When a search engine receives mixed messages (i.e. multiple keywords), the exact subject of the site (or more correctly, the website pages), will be unclear.

These limitations and tradeoffs are another reason why a clear SEO strategy and implementation plan are important. Once a strategic plan is in place, then and only then, should a business consider commencing the SEO project or campaign. Without this plan, any results will be random.

Finally, the SEO term itself can be misleading. To generate increased traffic to a site, you need more than just keyword-based search engine strategies.

For example, Link Popularity (increasing link popularity by constantly securing and updating links from other pages) is a field of study in itself, considered by some to be more influential and productive than ‘conventional’ SEO tactics. Visit our page on ‘Breaking SEO into manageable phases’ for more details.