| SEO for CMS |
What is SEO?SEO, or SMO, is short for search engine optimisation / suchmaschinenoptimierung. It is the process of increasing visitor traffic to a website by natural means (as against by paid-for methods); ensuring that a higher percentage of visitors do business with the site owners; and improving quality at all levels, including strengthening the brand and protecting business reputation. It is one of the two core methods of improving website income. Ideally, SEO is focused on improving quality in all areas, as that is the key to long-term reliable results.Why does a website need SEO?A commercial website needs results. It is only there to earn a living, so that must be prioritised. However, there are other concerns: the business reputation and brand strength, which are long-term factors that need to be improved steadily and securely.There are only two known ways to increase website income: SEO (search optimising) and advertising. Advertising is a good way to improve results, and the methodology is well proven. However, it requires a continuous commitment. When you turn off the tap, the flow stops. The Internet provides us with another route: search engine traffic. This is a new area for commerce as there is no real off-line equivalent. Search engines are remarkably effective as a source of visitors and often send 70% of a website's traffic. To optimise this traffic source, and to efficiently use the resulting traffic, we employ SEO. In fact, SEO is a remarkably efficient way to do this: it is many times more efficient than advertising, since when work stops the benefits continue. The gains are persistent. Website income will drop back to a figure of around 80% of the optimum, but that is still a very good result compared to latent advertising benefit. When do we need SEO?A website only needs it if income, traffic or visibility needs improving; non-commercial sites will see the benefits but may find the costs hard to bear. Therefore SEO is best seen as a method for improving commercial results. It is remarkably effective in terms of the ROI (return on investment), since anything spent will be returned by a minimum factor of five, and hopefully by ten or better. A business that spends 3,000 units (of whatever currency) on SEO should see that returned as 15,000 to 30,000 units, assuming their contractors are competent. As a concrete example, it is not unusual to see a 50% increase in website income within one year, and many websites do better than this.At the higher end of the scale, the sums involved can be fairly large. Many national brands in the UK or US will spend $100,000 plus per year on SEO, and some - in tough markets - spend a lot more. For example a large enterprise with a website that is important to their business might elect to spend $250,000 on SEO; but they can expect that to produce $5million in gains. So SEO, done correctly, is very effective. The gains are normally higher than for advertising, and they are persistent. It is cheaper than advertising in the medium term, and certainly in the long term, although it may cost more in the short term. Perhaps most important of all, SEO improves the quality of a website at all levels - or at least, it should do - and therefore it contributes a great deal more to an organisation than simply buying a few adverts. Does every website need it?It's true that in less hard-fought markets, there is less demand, as competitors are less sophisticated. In contrast, in the fiercely-contested USA - UK English language Internet commerce areas, you cannot get anywhere without using effective SEO. All your top competitors will be using it, so without a strong SEO campaign you will get nowhere.As a result, many enterprises are forced to rely on advertising as a source of business, since there are relatively few top SEO providers. Also, if you think about it, there are only a few slots at the top of the search results, and anyone not in them is excluded from the main business source. In order to get the traffic volume required, you need to be at position number 1 to number 4 in the biggest search engines. SEO is an intensely pressure-driven business process, and this leads to two things: it changes and advances rapidly; and there are strong drives to cut corners. Taking easy options, with less-reputable methods, can produce excellent gains in the short term; but this is not the foundation for a safe and secure commercial future. From this we can see that your SEO providers need to constantly research new methods; and that they must keep absolutely to the straight and narrow path of correct ethical methods. The risks are too high otherwise. |
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| Last Updated ( Sonntag, 15 März 2009 ) | ||
