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11.04.09 Becoming More Creative With Your SEO  By
Ravi Venkatesan
Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue. Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients' sites. 1) On page optimisation: The search engine algorithms in place today are way more sophisticated than what it was a few years ago. This makes SEO such a dynamic field that SEO techniques which worked well no so long ago have lost their charm in the present. With the incredible level of testing and research being done today by the likes of the amazing team at SEOmoz, the only on page factor worth its salt in terms of pure SEO value and ranking on the SERPs seems to be the title tag. The alt tag is making a comeback. The header tags have diminished in their SEO value and are now more useful to describe the information hierarchy on a page. Some of the other factors like well formed URLs and internal linking can help but to a certain extent. All in all, in my opinion, I would conservatively attribute the impact of on page SEO factors to be between 30% and 35% when it comes to ranking well on the SERPs. The majority of the action clearly takes place outside the website and hence outside the sphere of influence of what a site webmaster can tweak on her site. 2) Top Quality Content: Content is the currency of the web. The more unique it is and higher its value in disseminating valuable information, the more powerful it is and gets traded heavily on the web by being passed around. Even top shelf companies who are a force to reckon with in their domain of business get so clouded in their vision of their industry that they either get too technical in their content delivery or just are not in tune with the demands of their market. Everything evolves in life and so do consumers as they search for products/services using search terms that are not technical or even colloquial. All that needs to be done is to do a keyword research to find out what prospective customers are searching for. A look at Google Trends, Amazon and Twitter will also reveal what search terms are hot in a particular industry and pretty much the talk of the town at a given point of time. The next thing to do would be to go to industry specific forums related to the keyword and read posts wherein users are asking questions related to the industry using these popular keywords. You must remember that not everyone who surfs the web is looking to buy a product/service. Everyone has some problem or the other and people are looking for solutions to solve their problems. What starts off as a search for general information leads a user to looking for more specific information, then research and review of the products/services available and culminating in the purchase of the relevant product/service. The content developer/webmaster can focus on topics that target these most searched keywords and develop content that provide solutions/advice to the pressing problems in that industry in sync with the targeted keywords. Every piece of content written on the web does not have the propensity to go viral. Creating viral content is one of the most bandied terms on the web. It is not easy. You can get it right only after many attempts. So it is wise to dwell on topics that are popular in the present term (and relevant to your niche) and develop content towards that end. You would be wise to avoid the curse of duplicate content within your site. This can arise due to two versions of the domain in existence, namely http://www.site.com and http://site.com You can also have the case of multiple distinct URLs leading to the same content. Canonicalization can help reduce this problem. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing consultancy, offering organic seo and pay per click marketing services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia. |
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