SEO Optimized Website
[noun]
An ‘SEO optimized website’ is a digital platform that has either been developed with SEO objectives in mind, or has undergone what we term a thorough SEO check, and consequent refurbishing.
Search engine optimization (SEO) Strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) Strategy is a crucial and fundamental process we highly recommend and include as part of Strategy for all companies with whom netamorphosis partners and helps to grow. The logic here is simple, an optimized website is more easily understood by search engine crawlers and this increases the chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPS). In our experience, it is in fact through an SEO optimized website that we can generate the highest long-term ROI. This is why, as we like to say, at neta SEO is a forethought, not an afterthought.
SEO
Search engine optimization marketing is a strategy and an insights-driven approach, that leverages keywords to ensure solid digital presence and search result rankings for a business/product/service online, on Google (main industry player), Bing and any other search engine tool. SEO, helps search engines crawl, process and understand a website’s content, and therefore helps acquire a meaningful traffic stream of end-users that are actually interested in the products or services that are marketed or plugged in such online context.
SERP
A SERP is a search engine’s results page, aka the page of results or links an end-user would see when searching for something on Google (or another search engine like Bing). SERP easily indicates whether a website can be optimized for better positioning. A SERP ranking refers to a website’s position on the results page, and the higher up on page 1 (closer to what neta’s CEO Lyde Spann calls ‘Google’s Golden Triangle’), the better.
SEM
Search engine marketing is a process that goes beyond SEO, as it also includes the possibility for marketers to gain traffic/visibility in search engines by paying a cost, often attached to a specific keyword. Through SEM-driven paid search advertising (PSA) and services like Google AdWords, marketers can buy advertising space (CPC), securing their place in the top of the search engine paid results real estate.
In our day-to-day work as a digital marketing agency, and as part of our Analytics Consulting service, neta leverages search optimization to first-of assess how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by targeted audiences. Based on these results, we would plan the most strategic and cost-efficient way forward: optimizing a website may involve editing its content, HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines, and ranges upon sophistication levels.
More specifically, with all of the website platform set-up work we would do for any of our neta clients, there is a focus on attaining prime positioning within the ‘Google Golden Triangle’, by ensuring that client site’s (web) page hierarchy and site infrastructure (organization) results in optimizing our clients organic (Google) search results. However, since SEO is a complicated initiative, when advocating for an aggressive and specialized SEO vs. SEM (paid search) user acquisition tactic, we would also often vouch for a separate SEO services engagement, that prioritizes this complex, technical work and delegates both neta and client resources towards attaining specific performance objectives.
Top 3 Elements for SEO Efficency
- Quality Content: Genuinely interesting, useful, well planned content is what attracts users and ultimately what will hook them to a digital platform. A strategy-led and quality driven approach, focusing on beautiful and engaging visual displays, as well as, on rich long form text, is what makes our content creation game on-point and award-winning.
- User Experience: Making things easy, nice and smooth for the end-users so that they are inclined to explore further is our ultimate goal. Building a strong site architecture and providing clear navigation will help search engines index websites quickly and easily. This will also, more importantly, provide visitors with a good experience, and encourage repeat visits. Which is why, for all website platforms that we are tasked with building, we always ensure they are easily navigable and clearly searchable, with relevant internal linking and related content.
- Speed & Responsiveness: Google rewards webpages that load quickly, as that again is helpful for end-users and their overall user-experience. If speed is key, so is cross-device compatibility. What is cross-device compatibility? It is a website in which all content components are equally optimized for any given screen size or device and that is also particularly effective on mobile, which is often called ‘responsive design’ and is rewarded by both users (new and repeat) and search engines for efforts to optimize UX design and speed across all devices.
SEO marketing is what will directly affect the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s ‘natural’ or un-paid (‘organic’) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. Methods we would use to achieve solid search optimization results would vary from technical practices, which are often behind the scenes of a website (we tend to refer to this as ‘technical and on-site SEO’) to all the promotional ’off-site’ approaches available to raise a site’s visibility (including things like link-building and even social media marketing that is consistent with core keywords for greater universal digital footprint “in roads”).
More specifically, technical and on-site SEO encompass all immediate sets of actions that can be applied directly to a digital platform, to make it search engine friendly. These include, for instance: key word balance (to avoid over-stuffing and over-optimization penalty) correct use of H1, H2 and optimized titles; good descriptions, well formatted URLs, bolding, thought through use of images (i.e. with Image Name & ALT Tags). Conversely, off-site SEO refers to strategic actions taken outside of a company’s website to impact their rankings within SERPs.
In our experience—working on SEO strategy with SEO leaders such as Newport Academy and others—achieving off-site ranking factors involves improving search engine and user perception of the overall brand, but also—more specifically—of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. Our neta go-to recipe to accomplish this would be through organic and white-hat types of back-linking and mentions by other reputable places online, as well as, leveraging traditional media (pages, sites, people, etc.). By talking about our clients work and sustaining their online presence, these sources would also “vouch” for the quality of their online content, and for their overall thought leadership.
Ultimately, SEO is an umbrella term under which fall many (if not most) of the strategy-driven methods and services (ranging from content creation to information architecture and UX) we activate to ensure the visibility of a website and its content on SERPs, achieving high ROI and quick/solid KPI achievement.
