Search Engine Optimization
“What controls do I have at my disposal to influence my position in the search engines? ”
SEO step-by-step approach
Onsite SEO Basics
The main control for SEO resides at your own domain. Make sure that you grasp that opportunity, and provide every page on your website with at least a title tag and meta description. The title tag tells the search engine what the page is about and the metadescription gives some more insight into the contents and purpose of the page.
Onsite SEO Next
The next steps in optimisation is to help the search engine to understand your website a bit better. Internal links on your site help doing that on the relationships of different content topics/items. Header tags help breaking the content into different sections which makes the content easier to readable and Image names & ALT tags make imagery become more connected to the written content
Keyword research
keyword research can be done in many different ways and you’ll find all over the web different methods of approach. None of them is wrong or right as they all adhere to different website positions, the industries the’re active in or its competitive landscape, goals and objectives, budget, resources and deadlines. In rough you start with your seed keywords, they are the foundation of your business. Then generate keyword ideas, Understand the metrics they have, group them and last but not least prioritise.
Content, content & content
The purpose of your online presence is all about the value that your organisation brings to the market. Luckily both humans and search engines love content on your site. The higher the quality the bigger the rewards. As it can be rather time and money consuming balance your efforts in productions of (industry) articles, expert blogs, tutorial, checklists, how-to-guides, infographics, dynamic videos and podcasts and truly measure their appreciation.
link building
The idea of link building is all about recognition from elsewhere that what your message is, truly ads value. You have a certain level of trustworthiness which is an importent reason for the visitor to consume your content. The more external links (or you may say votes) you get, the better your site fulfills a need. Keyword anchor text in links go even deeper into the actual topics that you publish.
Getting the links is easy for organic links, they come without you asking for it, all others require some initiative on your end to request them. The easiest is to sign-up with various industry directories that offer links to your website, but as always try to avoid shady ones as they will downgrade the value. You can also offer a guest blog post to popular blogs in your industry , normally as a compensation you’ll get links to your site. The more difficult and time consuming ones are links granted from partners and organisations within your industry and eco-system. Actively work with them on this will result in high quality links that last long.
Monitor your results
Search engine optimisation is not a one-off activity, it requires constant attention to maintain, or even better, improve your position. In order to properly monitor your progress Brightedge is a great resource to optimise both content en tech of your website from an SEO perspective. Google Analytics helps you to get a better understanding of visitors behaviour on your site which is a great input for your SEO improvements.
Selecting the right tools to improve your online positions
Getting your organizations activities, propositions and believes online is a relatively easy thing to do. But ensuring this information is valued by a search engine responsible for your ranking position is another thing. Various software solutions are available today, unfortunately they often represent only a fragment of the broad scope allowing you to influence your online positions. How do you guarantee the best TCO?
Stand alone solutions vs platform approach
We at DWDA strongly recommend when selecting a search engine optimisation solution to consider the following functionalities that ideally are offered in one UI and with a common workflow. This will have a high impact on the steepness of the learning curves of your resources. The way new people or agencies are onboarded on your SEO effort and last but not least the level and quality of insights and interpretations coming from multiple angles generated data. Fragmented functionality also means data separation and increased complexity when analysing.
Search engine optimisation
At its core SEO solutions come in a broad variety of flavours. Having all of the required functions available in one platform, ranging from keyword and trend analysis to reporting and hand-on guidance on how to resolve or reposition is keeping your operation tightly managed in a consistent way.
ECO-sytem construction
Building eco-systems is a very fashionable concept many people speak about nowadays. SEO solutions, with their ability to scan for keyword based ranking positions, in particular identifying influential competitor domains, their share-of-voice and activity focus can do much more than just improve SEO positions,
Technology validation
Many organisations struggle with their online positions and utilise SEO solutions and/or service providers to overcome that challenge. Remarkable enough the conversation is always about the keyword/positioning side, whereas the biggest hidden diamond, insights in tech and implementation quality, remains untouched
