Your search engine optimization strategy should focus on two
fundamental goals:
- deliver as targeted as possible visitor traffic;
- acquire high conversion rates (visitors taking the desired
type of action on your web site).
This is what SEO can do for you and your business: ultimately
bring you customers and/or partners.
These goals are most likely to be attained when the following
conditions take place:
- search engines index the site;
- search engines crawl the site frequently;
- high ranking among SERPs for your web site’s keywords;
- high link popularity;
- high page rank.
For every query performed on search engines there is a human
being at the end of the keyboard looking for information,
products, or services. You have to direct your focus towards
grabbing as much search engine traffic as possible with your
most important keywords while keeping the objectives of the
search engine optimization in clear focus.
Before you get too excited about attaining a top 10 ranking
on the search engines, you should be clear on the objectives
behind bringing visitors to your website.
It’s not a good idea to go from 1,000 visitors to
10,000 visitors over a month if your website is not relevant
to your visitors’ search terms. Having “forced
visitors” onto your web site will simply eat your resources
(bandwidth, for one) but for sure these visitors will not
become your customers if the topic of your web site is of
no interest to them.
Such an accomplishment, like a major increase in traffic
stats, may make you SEO hero of the day, but if your web
site visitors are not interested in your products or services
you will have just squandered your efforts.
Your goal is to help the search engines return the most
relevant pages from your web site in response to user queries.
Using tricks and tactics to get your pages to show up under
search terms that are irrelevant and have nothing to do with
your site only annoys web surfers, and can get you banned
from the search engines.
Ultimately, the number of hits measured in your web server
logs will make no difference if your visitors are not taking
action on your website to sign up for a newsletter, download
your software, submit a quote request, or buy your products
and services online.
Most of the web sites in the top positions for even moderately
competitive keywords got there because:
- they used highly targeted keywords effectively throughout
their website; - they gained substantial link popularity
from relevant websites and directories.
Although simplistic in terms of today’s very complex
search engine algorithms used to return relevant search engine
results, the two above key points lay the foundations for
all our future discussions about how to gain top rankings
on today's search engines.
Apisith Chawla is an author, consultant, and SEO Trainee.
His eBook is available at
http://www.equalseo.com/ebook
