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.