Keeping Up with Growth — How to Shine Using SEO (Part 1 of 3)

Mar 15

MikeGeneral Business Practices, SEO link building, SEO 2 Comments

Last Monday, Forrester Research published a research study that indicated that online retail sales are going to continue to grow over the next five years.  Specifically, the projections call for an increase of roughly $100 billion in spending ($155.2B spent in 2009, projected $248B in 2014).  Is your business ready for this predicted 10% compounded annual sales growth?

Truth is, a lot of businesses talk search engine optimization (SEO) by using popular buzzwords like “keywords”, “meta tags”, etc.  To explain SEO to many of our clients, I use the analogy of building a house.  Before you can start building, you’ve got to lay a sturdy foundation.  In the case of SEO, the “foundation” refers to a table-less and compliant web coding, researched and analyzed keywords, etc.  Like a house, a sturdy foundation is vital; a prerequisite for any future optimization efforts.  However, an effective SEO strategy must encompass much, much more than a simple foundation.

It’s true that a website can rank well by simply having a great foundation, but “well” is relative.  Ideally, a website will rank for competitive, broad, generalized phrases and keywords.  A solid foundation may increase search volume, but the volume will be based on less searched and less competitive terms.  For example, let’s look at two phrases [red velvet wedding cake designer New York City] vs. [cake designer].  The latter phrase yields nearly 10,000 searches a month while the former yields just a few.  As a business owner, would you like to try and rank in the top 10 of a 10,000 person/month search phrase, or rank in the top 10 of the more popular search?  Naturally, you’d want to rank in the top 10 of the more popular search.  Why?  Because 95% of SEO traffic comes from Page 1 of the search results, so it’s imperative that you rank well.

As more and more people use search engines to find what they’re looking for online, it is more important than ever for you to ensure that your product/website has visibility.  Visibility — there’s another relative word.  According to a recent eMarketer study, it’s not enough to have some visibility — but rather a site needs to be visible on Page 1 of Google.

With all the emphasis on being ranked on Page 1 of Google search results, you’re probably wondering, “how in the world do I do that?”  There are a number of ways, but the single most effective tactic to get a website to rank for a targeted keyword is by building inbound links.  Inbound links are links from other websites that point to yours.  Link building is a difficult, on-going SEO strategy.  Stay tuned for part two, to publish tomorrow, when we go through link building’s history and overview.