One of the fastest type of ad agencies to start up of late is SEO agencies, though they tend to be small in terms of staffing vs. the average ad agency size. So is Search Engine Optimization critical to building a successful website? We think it is. However, we do not believe it is something that should become a significant expense in your marketing budget or worse, take money away from other marketing activities that are more critical to your business' success.
So where should SEO start? Step one is to build your web pages so the search engines can catalog your content. We do that as normal course of practice with any of the websites we build. This involves including the appropriate meta tags in each page that include a unique title for each page, a description and keywords. We also submit your site to Google/Yahoo/Bing upon completion. That covers getting your site included in the search engine results, Most businesses want more than that though, because being listed does not guarantee you will show up on the first page of search results, and the further down the list you are listed the less likely you will be found.
So the next goal in the SEO is to improve your ranking. Over 80% of searches are conducted on Google, so that is the place to start. In general, Google assigns a page rank to your site, and that is a large factor in your ranking in search results. You can improve the rank of your site by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to your pages.
Ultimately though, the key to improving your search engine results is content. While some SEO firms can improve your site's ranking by manipulating the content on your site and changing keywords, this tends to work only as long as they continue to work on your site and manipulate your site, but never really building long term value. To build long term value in the search engines, we recommend investing in content. The more relevant content you have the more content the search engines can catalog...and content lasts a long time. Really good content lasts forever.
What does this mean then as a long term strategy? It means cover the basics in search engine optimization - keywords, descriptions, relevant content that matches your keywords, and regularly update and add to your content. News websites have always been some of the top traffic generating sites, why? because they add a lot of new stories every day, and the archive builds and builds.
What does To Eleven Marketing recommend you do then? We will help you build a site that the search engines find, help you build content, good relevant content, and we can help you build links from high traffic sites to improve your page rank. Beyond that, your money is best invested in building content and search engine marketing.