Empower Your Website To Claim Your Search Engine Presence

Author : Bharati Ahuja SEO is usually correlated with various concepts like rankings, links, content, etc. The Google Analytics metrics report the success or the failure depending on what metrics you focus on as per your web presence, purpose and priority. But, is SEO only about rankings and thereby traffic and conversions? The answer is an emphatic NO. I think that this sudden wave of correlating SEO with marketing is diluting the whole meaning and existence of the SEO industry. SEO though a branch of online marketing has its own purpose and identity which is beyond marketing – inbound or outbound. Good SEO empowers the website from the first link of the internal navigation structure to the last image displayed on the website. Good SEO empowers the website in such a way that as an offshoot the following benefits are derived: · A brand is built · The site gets regularly crawled and indexed by the search engines · The Technical aspects like the 301s, XML sitemaps, robots.txt etc. are up to the mark · The social media signals are integrated · Makes it immune to the negative effects of the algo. Changes · The site gets targeted locally and globally · Links get built naturally In order to derive those benefits the SEO needs to follow the strategic steps over a period of time . 

The SEO Cocktail

· Optimum On-Page SEO (Neither more nor less) · Strengthen the internal architecture and navigation · Ensuring that the content falls under the category of quality content · Ensuring that content on the site is available in a balanced form of images, text, video, podcasts, news, etc. · Set canonical and duplicate content issues · Work on reducing page load time · Future proof the site with relevant microformats · Make sharing the content easy so that the site has the potential for getting natural links built gradually · Monitor the social media presence from the search engine perspective i.e share knowledge and information to add the value aspect to the social media account · Claim local presence via Google places and submission in important local directories. · Regularly suggesting and ensuring the execution of ideas for quality natural inbound links · Defend the site against negative SEO · Take corrective measures if the site gets affected adversely impacting the search engine presence negatively · Improve landing page design for better conversions · Improve upon the existing links and discard any if harmful · Customize 404 pages so that traffic from broken links is not lost · Monitor the analytics metrics to keep on improving continuously All these tasks involved in achieving SEO targets are a cocktail of logical, technical, management, design & development, promotion and psychological efforts which carve a special niche for SEO in the online world. SEO is a complete package due to which all roads from the web lead to your website or some online presence of the website reaping direct or indirect benefit. Measuring SEO success by the marketing perspective and the standard analytics metrics like visits, conversions, bounce rate, pages per visit etc. is a very narrow approach. All SEO benefit cannot be quantified as all the SEO efforts help build an online goodwill, reputation, persona, brand, reflect the company culture, add to the trust and authority factor and much more. The benefit accrued from all this cannot be quantified by any formula. You may get tired of spending on Ads. And paid campaigns, social media patterns may change affecting your social media marketing campaigns but genuine SEO efforts made for web presence keep adding on to the quality presence making it richer like old wine and empowering your overall web presence and website continously. June 14, 2012