subject: A Beginners Guide To SEO [print this page] In a nutshell, search engine optimisation is the process of making a website or web page more visible to search engines like Google, Yahoo! And Bing. With an SEO team on board, companies can look forward to their site performing better for search terms that are relevant to the products they sell or service they offer. Furthermore, SEO isn't just about getting to number one on Google but also about analysing traffic, integrating social media and making websites more user friendly to allow for better conversion of site visits into sales leads.
The first step in any SEO campaign is to perform a technical audit on the site. A thorough technical audit allows for a number of problems to come to the fore that could affect the ease with which search engines index a website. Broken links, duplicate pages, lack of site-maps and indexed PDFs and cause hinder a website performing well in search engine result pages. Performing an SEO technical audit allows you to address these problems early before moving onto the next stage of your campaign.
With technical aspects complete, it's the time to turn your attention to the marketing side of SEO. Creating a marketing audit is important for two reasons; firstly it allows you to ascertain which keyphrases are important to your site and, among these, which are the best traffic drivers for bringing more relevant traffic to your site. Secondly, a marketing document will give rise to a variety of previously untapped opportunities, such as seasonal offers, which might not have been discovered if the audit had not taken place and can drive even more traffic to your site.
Finally, with the technical and marketing side complete, the full search engine optimisation package can be tied together with the all important use of conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
CRO is the process of assessing a web-page or entire website from the point of view of the visitor in a bid to improve usability and subsequently the number of visits that convert into sales leads. Working hard in other areas of SEO to bring in increased traffic levels is one thing but without the use of CRO these actions could be wasted.
