Although I have worked in the web industry for nearly 4 years now and build in SEO basics from the outset with clients, it is still usually very difficult to help a client understand the options available in increasing new visitors.

If you’re still undecided, here’s a brief outline of the concept…

What is SEO?

In case you are reading this without knowledge of this particular acronym, Search Engine Optimisation is a form of online marketing that takes advantage of the huge opportunity popular search engines like Google provide in generating visits to your site. Search engines balance a number of factors in deciding the order of sites listed when searching a particular term. These factors are primarily: Age of the domain used, relevance of frequently updated content, plus the quantity and relevance of sites linking to yours. Sounds simple, but for many its a job in its own right.

The Problem
Your site might include beautiful, glossy product shots and perfectly sculpted corporate identity, but you might be receiving just 10 to 20 unique visitors per day. The sales team are badgering you to improve lead generation, and the boss is asking why your online sales are low.

Getting a grasp of the task in hand can be tough. Ask yourself a few simple questions… Why would somebody visit your site? And how would they find it?

Over 50% of your site’s new visitors, who have never heard of your product or brand before, are likely to arrive via a search engine. That search engine is very likely to be Google. So that sounds like a good bet on improving your visitor count! Improving your site with SEO in mind will in fact help develop it in other areas too - improving the quality and quantity of information for your visitors, and developing relationships with other sites too.

Content Is King

It’s plainly obvious, but Search Engines like Google are text based search tools… You put a text based term into it, it checks all the text it has referenced, and gives you some text results. So it stands to reason that improving your results from Google is going to require either improving the text you have on your site, or adding more.

Relevancy is very important here. Imagine all the search terms that a potential customer might use to try to find a product or service like yours. The list could be in the hundreds, but start building a list. Consider them your Keywords and building them into the existing content you have on your site. Reword your mission statement if necessary, but if those keywords are not included then don’t expect to be listed for a search of that term.

Still have 100 Keywords left after all that? It sounds like you need to create some more content. How about a case study, a short article on a relevant topic, a top ten products list, or a seasonal newsletter? These old friends are a great way of creating new, freshly updated and relevant content for your site that Google will index. Don’t forget to repeat the Keywords in articles, improve the number of references and the relevancy of that page to that particular term is going to improve. Rather logical when you think about it?

Make New Friends (Or Enemies?)

Having some relevant, optimised content is a great start. But search engines like Google need to know that your site is the authority in your particular field. Not just a little site you built for fun one evening, your site is full of beneficial information, a centre of knowledge and the single best place to go for your product. How will it know this? Because other people think so, and they voted with their mouse by linking directly to your site, or a page on your site, with reference to that subject. And the guys who linked to you, their sites are relevant to yours too, not big indexes of a billion unrelated links, they are in the same field of business and are recommending you with a link. Why do they think your site is the best place to find out about your business area? Well, maybe its because you published some really insightful articles about that very subject. Maybe they like your products too.

Incoming links should come naturally as your site slowly becomes found, and through word of mouth. But you can help this along by alerting some relevant site owners to your existence with a quick email - avoid spammy messages or sending someone a press release when it really isn’t called for though. You might add a link to their site about their product/service first, and just let them know, they might reciprocate - but don’t beg.

Another great tool is Social Media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg or Facebook. Take careful advantage of these tools to bring some of your own pages to the attention of others, great for generating hits in their own right, but also require time and effort to avoid joining the thousands of people using them to spam. Definitely doing your homework and building up credibility is vital.

Got some great content now? Built up ten, twenty or a hundred links to your site? Best start checking where you appear in Google results for some of those Keywords. Maybe check the visitor counter too!

Start The Long-Game Now

SEO can be a long old game and can take hard work for some people to write good quality copy. Don’t forget that hiring an external copywriter or buying in relevant content could speed the process up.

However, beware shelling out money for links, and be very, very wary of any site that promises a #1 Google Rank for £30!

Good Luck!

Tags: generating new visitors, google, increasing hits, marketing, search engine optimisation, seo, seo basics, website traffic

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 12:16 am and is filed under Blog Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.