Tuesday 7 October 2008

SEO For Beginners - Lesson 1 - Know Your Business

So, you've been creating websites for a while now - you know some HTML, can cut-and-paste some javascript and have heard about the magical elixir "Search Engine Optimisation". So what is it and how can you use it?

At its most basic, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to do with making your site as attractive as possible to the major search engines and asking them to list you as high as possible in their search engines. But how does it work? Lets start from the other side of the equation first of all - your users.

You need to think about your users for a while - these are the people you are hoping to attract to your site. What kinds of words and phrases would they use to find your website? This is your first foray into search engine optimisation! Before you touch a single line of code, you need to have a list of keywords and keyphrases that your average user might type into Google or Yahoo and expect to find a site like yours. In the pre-internet days, this was called market research and is one of the key lessons you learn in marketing:

"You do NOT sell to people, you get people to BUY from you"

Lets just take a look at that statement for a second because if you do not understand what it means, then you are unlikely to grasp the necessary nuances in SEO activity. Successful businesses run because they have loyal client bases - people who not only choose to buy repeatedly from the same business but who will, in all probability, market that business for free, using the best advertising model of all time - personal recommendation. These clients will associate themselves with the business in question and may also associate that business with a particularly desireable lifestyle. Consider the Marks and Spencer chain in the United Kindgom - they position themselves at the top-end of the social market for food and clothing sales - their goods are not cheap however their customers associate the whole "Marks and Spencer" experience as desireable and are fiercely loyal to the brand.

So ask yourself the question:
"What am I selling?"

You needn't be selling anything tangible - it could simply be a message! In otherwords, what is the purpose of my site. Once you know that then you can start to think about who you want to convey that message to - who is your target audience? These are the people you are wanting to communicate with. Without knowing this, you might as well give up now because very few successful businesses succeed without a very clear understanding of what their business does and who its targetted client base are.

So now we have distilled your message and know exactly who we are targetting, we can move onto stage 2 and work out how to get that message across accurately and efficiently.


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