YOU DON’T NEED A DECODER RING

In the days before the Internet, there were decoder rings to unlock secret messages. Today it is online coding that can unlock new opportunities- incremental revenues, increased customer engagement, and improved website performance.

We have all been watching web sales become an ever increasing percentage of multichannel marketing results. Lulled by the growth, we don’t always recognize that we still may be leaving money on the table (or in cyberspace, as the case may be). Marketsmith has been chanting the SEOmmmm mantra for years now (see our newsletter dated June 2007). It is a proven method of increasing incremental online sales.

We offer an SEO audit (Sitesmith) which delivers detailed recommendations within a specific time frame for improving website performance and extending brand visibility. Below we present our audit framework for assessing and improving optimization efforts.

SEO is all about coding, once the strategy has been set. Strategy determines how factors will be manifested. Coding ensures the strategy is implemented. The strategy must include direction for each of the following factors.

• Links which ensure people can find the site and then move easily within it
• Content which draws people to the site,
• Keywords used to describe the structure of the site and its content and images on each page.

These three elements work in concert. Changes in any of them have ramifications for the other two, as will become obvious in the discussion of each.

Links
Links can be both external and internal. Both add to the credibility of the site for search engines. External links are an indication of value to potential searchers and internal links speak to a cohesiveness of the site.
Internal links connect the pages of the site to each other. The site navigation is the pattern of the internal links. These internal links serve two purposes: (1) they make it easy for visitors to navigate through the site and (2) they show the search engines that the site is cohesive and therefore more likely to be valid.

Content
In real estate, it is location, location, location! In SEO, it is content, content, content! Content is what draws visitors to the site – the site contains information that the visitors want – information about the company, its products and services, how to use its products and services, how and where to purchase, etc.
Content can be presented in text, images, video, audio, and links. Each one of these must be set up on the site in a way that tells the search engine the information that the company wants to convey (see keywords below) and what, in fact, customers want to know. Search engines prefer newer content to older content.

Keywords
Keywords go hand in hand with coding. The goal is to make sure that the coding for the site includes the keywords for which the site should be optimized. Ideally there should be 25-50 keywords which are identified to be optimized on a site in order to improve organic search rankings.

All site pages must be coded in addition to the visible content on the page. There are two pieces to the coding – the directory structure and the content descriptions. Meta tags are used for content descriptions. “Meta data” include the title of the page and the description of the page, which uses appropriate keywords. Additionally, search engine crawlers cannot actually view images; therefore coding for images must be part of the meta data.

The directory structure is how the pages are named and linked to each other. Search engine crawlers also use the site’s domain name, directory structure, and page names to help weight their rankings.

Paid Search – It is critical that the SEO program and paid search campaigns should be created in concert, to make sure that the site is consistent in the eyes of customers/visitors, promoting the same keywords through each medium. Also when strategies are developed together, paid search dollars can be maximized by balancing results with organic rankings.

Plan for Improving Web Performance
Search engine optimization generates incremental sales.
Marketsmith’s SEO audit (Sitesmith) delivers a comprehensive plan for improving a website for search engine optimization. Additionally we can implement the recommendations for companies that do not have the requisite technical staff in-house.

Call us today to explore how we can help your site increase revenues and visibility.

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