Search Engine Optimization (US Spelling!)

"Imagine organising a party - You booked and decorated the hall; bought all the food and drinks. On the day of the party you stand idly at the door, waiting for your first guests...a couple of hours later, when no-one has turned up, you realise you forgot to send out the invites!'

"Having a website without Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is like having a party and not sending out the invites - how will your customers find you?"

What is Search Engine Optimization?

To help you understand the SEO process, Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising a website for search engines (obvious, eh?). Search Engine Optimization consists of two parts - we have listed these below:

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is what we do to the actual website itself. There are many elements of on-page optimization, including (but not limited to):

Canonicalisation “Canonicalisation happens when you can access a website through both (two or more different URLs) www.my-web-site.co.nz and my-web-site.co.nz. Sometimes search engines will effectively index two identical copies of your site as a result of this. It is unlikely that your website will be subjected to duplicate content penalties. However, the safest way to avoid this is to implement a redirect to your primary website rather than allowing the search engine to choose which one it will show by giving it more than one option."

META Data "Meta data provides descriptions about data. The most important meta data tags for purposes of search engine optimisation are:

• Meta Title Tag - The Meta Title Tag is what appears on the top of users' (including yourself) webpages and browsers. It is also shown in the title of your search results. It is important that the title tag is limited to a certain number of characters, is formatted correctly, and has correct keyword placement. The title tag should be unique for every page on your website.

•  Meta Description Tag - The Meta Description Tag is the brief outline that appears in the search results, beneath the title tag. This should also be limited to a certain character count and should contain compelling copy to entice the searcher to click on your website. Without a description tag, it is far more difficult to achieve click-throughs.

Keyword Placement "Placing keywords in the correct places on the webpage (like in the heading tags, alt tags and within the copy) help search engines understand what the page is about. Visualise a search engine spider crawling through your website, looking in certain places like the title, description and heading tags. This helps Google to establish what your page is about"

Off-Page Optimization

Off-page optimisation is everyting we do to improve rankings without actually touching the website. A massive amount of this is what is known as link-building. Link-building is the time-consuming, incremental process of creating links from external websites that point to the website we are optimising. This can be done in many ways. Here are some of them:

• Article Marketing - Creating unique and informative articles about your industry. If they are of a certain standard, they can be published online. Once published, you can get two self-serving links from the Author's Biography paragraph.
• Press Releases - Another great method of obtaining links. This involves writing and publishing press releases with back links. The more online publications that pick it up, the more links you'll get.
• Blog Posting - This can be a tricky one - no-one likes people who just turn up on blogs and embed links there (some regard this as spamming). Blog posts must have original content and be formulated very carefully to remain in situ and to derive benefit.
• Forum Postings - Much the same as blog posting.
• Social Bookmarks - You can't go anywhere without hearing about social media these days. This has gone even further - Now you can obtain back links from social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg and others.
• Link Bait - You can offer something interesting or exciting that naturally make people want to link others to your website. A good example of this may be a free book, discounted services or tool that people can use.
• Much much more - There are so many more ways to get links....we don't want to give away all our secrets!

Why Undertake Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization has permeated the World Wide Web ever since search engines reached people's households, and the Internet became a financially viable means to market a business. It allows small businesses to compete with massive corporations on an (almost) even footing. 

SEO campaigns must be executed well or they can be detrimental to your business. People offering 'instant results' or 'guaranteed listings' (more often than not) will be doing something that may provide short-term results, but will ultimately lead to problems in the long run. There is no point trying to trick Google - they have brains far better than ours (like Matt Cutts) that identify websites that try to trick them. These 'illegitimate' websites will usually be demoted to the depths of search engine results.

Pure SEO are optimization specialists. We have an international clientele, all managed by our experienced team operateing from New Zealand. We do not offer website development or design - that is not our speciality: We leave those tasks to the experts in that field.

Pure SEO delivers top-notch online marketing services - customer satisfaction is our number-one priority, as every single one of our clients will testify.