Holistic Search Engine Optimization

Internet marketing with all its bells and whistles fundamentally is not that different from other marketing avenues companies pursue. Yes, the implementation strategies and vehicles are different but they both should adhere to principals learned in Marketing 101. Who are you trying to reach? Is it the 30 year old male or the 75 year old grandmother? Or both?

Defining your target audience is second only to defining the goals and objectives of your site. Is your goal to share information and create a community? To establish or strengthen your brand? To sell your products? To sell your services? To become a knowledge portal with several different monetization strategies? Ample time spent in strategic planning lays the foundation for your web site. Combine your goals and objectives with your market research to identify your target audience, do your keyword research and then design your web site to make sure you are reaching this audience and enticing them to do what you want them to do while they are there – buy something, fill out a contact form, call you, etc..

Search engine optimization encompasses many strategies to improve the amount of traffic you are attracting to your web site. Getting this traffic to your web site is one step in the process. You don’t benefit from these efforts unless you are converting these visitors.

Do you have a good user experience on your site? Do people easily understand how to find what they are looking for – quickly? It’s all about quickness, blink and they are gone if your site isn’t instantly understandable. Can they get to what they want within three clicks? Is the design of your web site appealing to your target audience? Are you targeting the right key phrases? Is the code on your pages optimized for these key phrases? How about the back end architecture – is it optimized? Do the search engine bots find your site easy to index, easy to understand? Are you asking for the sale? Appropriately? Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? How many come to your home page and go no farther? How many pages on average do they look at? Which pages have a high bounce rate – meaning the percentage of visitors that bounce from a page – not converting?

A broad, holistic approach to SEO looks at all aspects of your web presence integrating strategy, design and implementation with seo best practices to accomplish your goals.