Online Solutions by Isamap Tec Solutions

What is SEO really?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process of building and revising a website with an aim of improving the sites page ranking with an objective of achieving quality traffic. SEO is a process and not a one time job like most people think. No one should lie to you that he can help you achieve a specific traffic within a period of time.

This is a big lie. SEO is the sure way of getting quality traffic and maintaining a website highly ranked. Going for Paid methods (eg adwords) only gives you a little boost yet you pay for it and therefore is only for those who want to be ranked high very fast and sad to say this, they are on their way to falling down as fast as they ranked high. This is because it is forced ranking by juicy keywords that ‘may be’ gives back empty promises to the reader. SEO is a process and it needs a lot of patience and effort. It pays. I am not ruling out 'adwords' do not get me wrong. But know this is paid advertising approach and needs to also be mixed by other approaches to be perfect.

What brings about Healthy SEO Rankings?
Significance or Relevance – When a user searches for something on a search engine using a keyword, a site that he visits and gives him satisfaction means that its relevant. Mostly when that keyword is used severally without abuse (severe repetition) then it increases the page’s significance. Most preferably appear on the title, headings and the body but with a good measure.
Recognition or Popularity – New links to a page adds its popularity

1.    Site preparation for SEO.
Involves:

• Website development – Setting up a user friendly interface that allows search engines indexing (Crawling of Search engines spiders). Avoiding too much use of flash, complicated JavaScript and DHTML or stopping the crawlers with the robots.txt file, use of frames etc. The use of CSS (Cascading style sheets) is good for search engines. Text should be visible, using same colour as the background may lead to penalizing.
• Your website should be a stand alone website and not a hosted site eg. me.somehost.com. Instead it should be www.mysite.com (fits the home page) or www.me.mysite.com (fits well a site’s blog) or www.mysite.com/me (good for blogs or any extention). This is for the reason that you want customers to gain confidence in your products as much as possible. They will trust when you own a site than when hosted elsewhere like blogger.com.
• Set up all the tools necessary for SEO. The reason search engine optimization is recommended is for the simple reason that customers need to find you to buy your products/services. If it is not for that reason then, search engines would not be necessary. Just like a business suffers loss if no customers find its location or existence, so does a website which is online. It is black to the world unless marketed. A few tools are important for SEO workability.
• Blog (Use a software that is search engine friendly e.g. wordpress) – A blog is useful since it updates a website with new content more often making search engine bots to always sneak around to pick whatever is new. It is by far the most powerful marketing tool there is online especially when you want to explain to customers more about your products/services. Every single article in a blog is a possible marketing link that can make a great difference for a business.
• A forum is a tool that enables communication or discussions with your customers mostly to answer any questions and resolve any issues making your business a wonderful environment and customer friendly. Customers need to feel satisfied by your services and most of all your customer care. The customer should have a SENCE OF BELONGING.
• A Newsletter tool works together and better with a blog. Any new article could be a newsletter delivered directly to your customers/visitors mail boxes. This will help you create even more relationships with your customers and update them more often of your services and what is going on in your business.
• FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions) answered. This section of a website is useful to both the website (business) owner and the visitor or customers. Though the forums might serve this purpose, the FAQ’s cover answers that customers ask more often and therefore will get quick answers enough to help him make a decision without many struggles.

2.    Website (Business) must do what it says it can do!
The best advise to this warning is to do what it says. Do not offer anything less for customers than you have promised. In fact, let them come to your website and find even better things than promised. Why? If you are not careful, and have done good SEO, chances are that you will loose as many customers as you get them. Prepare the website with products and services well laid. If a product requires purchasing, then make sure the website can process payments securely. Configure all the tools required for online purchases and you are good to go. Offer a customer care number that they can call (eg. Toll free number). A contact form is important where the customer wants to communicate in a deeper way. Lay out the products and services well explained. Use short sentences with simple English. If possible offer different language options to cater for customers who are not comfortable with your language. Entice your website too with graphics since images speak louder than words. For the blog and forums or FAQ’S, allow for customer’s speak back or commenting as this helps to understand them better.

3.    Another rule: Communicate back to your customers!
Every time a customer appreciates your product especially online, chances are that he/she will communicate back. Now that you have offered the tools to do this, get to a habit of reading your mails. Communicate back to your customers for by so doing you will give them a sense of belonging and make them even become potential customers to keep. You do not want to miss this! If a customer purchases a product, thank him immediately by sending an email. This will entice him to even come for more.

Remember SEO is not done in a day, or overnight or even one year. It is a process that helps your business grow. You have to live with it everyday just like you live with your business. Chances are that your marketing trend will set itself and it will make work very easy especially when customers direct themselves to your website after a tiring hard work of sleepless nights of SEO. Yes, one day you will take a nap and watch your business grow online without much hard work. But! Before you get there! Get to work!