Don’t optimise your website

if you want minimal traffic to your site.

But what would be the point in that? If you have a site, of course you want traffic. Surprisingly there are some clients that do not even think about seo. I am always battling to encourage those important stakeholders in a web project to use implement seo before the site has been built, ever before the wireframes are signed off.

Here are a few tips to help those fighting for seo overcome the hurdles:

1. Keyword research
You need to have evidence to back up why you want to use certain keywords for the website. If it is a new product launch and there is no search volume, use Google Insights to show how popular the term is.

2. Google Caffeine
What I like about this is that so many non seo people picked up on caffeine and the fact they thought it would affect their site dramtically. Little did they know that caffeine was working in the background and it was the press release by Google in June that announced they were happy with caffeine. In companies I have worked in, people are more responsive to seo when there are press releases from Google about algorithmns and updates.

3. Title and meta description
If there is not much you can do on the page as that would spoil the “design”, then at least optimise the page title and meta description. The page title is one of the most important elements of seo, you must make sure the keywords you want the page to rank for are the first terms in the title tag. Despite what the brand team may want, I would put the brand name at the end of the title tag.

4. Optimise their press release
If the company has press releases that they regularly post on their website, but has very little optimised copy, make sure you insert links in the body copy. Choose a couple of keyterms where you want to link from on the press release and link internally to that desired page.

5. Monitor all results
Make sure you report back on the results that you see in regards to the changes made. This will then give you more evidence to push forward for more seo changes. Once the client is amazed by the little work done so far and the amazing results, then you can suggest implementing seo as BAU on any new webproject.

Once clients have seen results, they can then begin to understand how important seo is for their website. Don’t give up if they are proving difficult and are reluctant to spend a lot of money on seo.

Link building campaign

If you want to increase traffic to your website here are some helpful hints:

1.Set objectives for the link building strategy
The link building strategy is the way to increase links to your website. It is important to write out exactly what you want to achieve. For example, you may want to increase visitors by x% by the end of the next 3 months. These objectives should tie in with the business objectives.

2. Site analysis – find out who links to your site now. You can do this by visiting linkpopularity.com. enter your url it shows the links to your site on google, msn and yahoo. Oh and it is free, so even better.

3. Research competitors – find out who is linking to your competitors. It is always a good idea to research thoroughly the competitors, look at their website, their page rank, their inbound and outbound links.

4. Links from other sites
Once you have completed points 2 and 3 you should have an idea of which sites you want link to your website. Email these people explaining the benefits their visitors will gain from link , the page address you want to link from and your contact details.

Link building is not a one off process. You will have to contact each individual site that you want linking to your site. And you will need to monitor the progress of the campaign. One easy way to do this is by installing google analytics which track the number of unique visitors to the site. Analytics will also show you the % of referring sites, so make sure that your target sites are among these. You may even find that there are new sites linking to you who you haven’t even asked. A bonus!!