April 30th, 2010 by Mike

Many people get carried away with social media optimization and backlink building strategies, while failing to realise that SEO starts from the inside out. If your rankings are low despite heavy external profiling, you need to look at your site’s architecture.

Never forget you’re running a commercial enterprise, not a long-term experiment in top ranking. People tend to put internet reputation management and ranking position under the same banner, completely forgetting that overshadowing them both is another banner yelling “conversion factors!”

The aim of SEO isn’t to increase the number of times the shop door opens – it’s to increase the number of people who actually stay long enough to buy something (or at least show a firm interest). What’s the point of paying hefty charges to get your site at the top of the rankings, if 70% of the people who click on your link promptly close it and go elsewhere?

If you don’t have a well constructed site, you won’t achieve high sales figures. It’s that simple. This isn’t necessarily restricted to navigability and artistic design. Visually, your site may look outstanding – but if the design isn’t linked to the needs of the customer, you won’t make a sale. A finance site, for example, won’t get very far if it’s laid out like a chic fashion store, with a home page full of images and little textual content.

This means your web-builder must be sympathetic to your goals and, preferably, familiar with your type of enterprise. So once your site is up and running, take a long hard look at it – and then at your competitors’. You need yours to stand out and look different – but this goes beyond snazzy graphics and streaming media. A well informed blog, for example, can work wonders if other sites are deficient in this area.

Search engine optimisation begins with making your site visible to the search engines. If the spiders can’t “crawl” easily, they won’t be able to index the pages. Sites that are well indexed stand a much better chance of appearing high up the rankings on searches.

This means a site map is essential on large sites, and a good idea on smaller ones. A site map helps the search spiders understand the hierarchy of the site, and access (and therefore index) individual pages quickly. SEO companies generally recommend a maximum of 75 – 100 links per map page, so if your site has a complex navigation menu make several maps – or even think about breaking the site down into smaller, individual domains.

However navigable your site is, you won’t get overnight results. It can take several weeks – even months – for your pages to start appearing high up the rankings. This is especially true of smaller sites, or those where the owner is new to internet commerce.

For this reason, search engine optimisation services often recommend opening a search engine marketing account, otherwise known as PPC (pay per click). Google AdWords is probably best known; Yahoo Search Marketing is another. This will ensure your site is visible from the word go, and can form an important part of your internet marketing plan.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.