Traffic Act Blog – SEO & PPC Demystified

I often get asked by clients to help them achieve better visibility on the web. Now, that is what I do, so its a fair question. But its not always easy to do.

Often I am presented with a website that has been built to please the CEO or some other highly paid person in the company. However, a website should be pleasing to the end user. One of those end users could be a search engine. So I find myself dealing with a website that has not got any of the groundwork in place to aid in getting better rankings.

How does your site get higher rankings?

Your site’s rankings are determined by a wide variety of factors. I like to split them up as follows;

1. on page factors (what you do to your own site)
2. off page factors (what happens on other websites that link to you)
3. technical factors (like domain name, hosting, coding etc)

By far the most important one to achieve rankings is the second, off page factors. Its often called “link building”. However, that is not to say the on page elements are not important.

Consider the on page elements to be your preparation to paint the walls of your house. Cleaning, taping and perhaps an undercoat. The off page elements can be compared to the actual painting.Just remember, paint won’t stick on walls that were poorly prepared. So,… what you do to your own site, is the groundwork that needs to be done, to build a successful link building campaign.

Yet this groundwork is often overlooked. A site may be looking swanky, but have no header tags, or page titles. I often see URLs that do not support the keywords of the brand or product on the site. Domain names that do not represent the locality of the business and cheap hosting plans overseas. The list goes on….

How to avoid SEO problems?

Simple. Don’t ring the SEO after the website  / upgrade / overhaul is finished.

As a matter of fact, several people need to come together to build a successful website.

Who should be involved when you consider a new website?

1. The Digital Marketer to set the website objectives and understand the target audience
2. The SEO to research what the target audience search for, which keywords and key phrases to incorporate in the site. The keywords can drive the website architecture and overall structure of the site.
3. The Web Usability Expert to make sure there is a good flow of information and the end user does not get lost in a muddle of information and bad navigation.
4. The Designer to create a good looking site that meets the needs of the target audience as well as the SEO
5. The Developer to write the code and make sure all request all built to spec.
6. The Security Person to ascertain what protection is needed to prevent hacking.
7. The Digital Marketer again to develop a marketing strategy that drives traffic to your site
8. The SEO again to set up a good link building campaign that ensures you have a site people can find on Google

An SEO is not just someone who helps you to get links. And an SEO is also your consultant in preparation for getting a website that has the ability to rank highly on Google.

Many large companies, franchisees and multi level marketers choose to set up their websites using standard business templates.

Dictating templates is mostly done by businesses or marketers to make life easier for the franchisee or other departments. A uniform design can be presented to the market place and the corporate image can be protected and controlled.

A lot of work goes into designing the business templates and the text that should be chosen to align with the corporate image and profile. After having spent a considerable amount on a template that will protect the corporate image as well as give e.g. franchisees a simple tool to work with, the complaints start to come in. The websites or pages are not converting any visitors or worse, are not even visible on the search engines.

Why is that?

Web Templates and SEO

If a standard business template would only provide a template for structure and design there would be no ranking issues. However, more often than not, the template also dictates content, which does not allow for unique and keyword rich content.

If all template pages were then also hosted on the same root domain, e.g. ;

• www.example.com/franchisee-one
• www.example.com/francihisee-two

etc etc. you become the perfect point in case for duplicate content.

Duplicate content

Having duplicate content is the best way to have your pages moved to the supplemental index which means you become very difficult to find on the search engines. Read more about duplicate content here.

SEO 101

What will get you rankings? SEO 101 list three very simple and irrefutable steps;

1. quality content
2. keyword rich content
3. unique content

Business templates dictating content

So if the content is prescribed by “the business” and ends up being very similar on every page… you are not meeting the above criteria to help the rankings of your own page.

So the best way to achieve rankings and visibility on the search engine is to;

1. have your own domain name (read more about choosing the right domain name)
2. create your own KEYWORD RICH content

Good luck!