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Website Development & Marketing Plan

(SEO – Search Engine Optimization)

for

organization

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary ... 3

Adrian Nonprofit Consulting ... 4

SEO Overview and Planning ... 5

The Importance of SEO Management ... 5

The Complexity of SEO Management ... 5

Search Engine Optimization Plan ... 5

Keyword Research, Analysis and Reporting ... 6

A Cautionary Tale: New vs. Old SEO Practices ... 7

Site Structure and Content ... 9

Structure ... 9

Content Planning ... 10

Social Media ... 11

External and Internal Links ... 11

Measuring SEO Effectiveness ... 12

A Final Note: International SEO ... 13

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Executive Summary

The important issue facing organizations is development of a comprehensive and informative website and marketing that website in an effective manner.

The Internet provides this effective manner with the greatest outreach potential. While social media has exploded in popularity on the Internet, websites remain the most effective means of providing the most information to clients and prospective clients – and in the most professional manner. While organizations and businesses must have a professional social media presence, its purpose must be to support the website and the comprehensive resources the website contains.

Potential customers and clients expect a business to not only to have a website, but one which is:

1. Visually clean and contemporary 2. Easily-navigable (user-friendly)

3. Concisely-written with comprehensive information and resources

4. Dynamic, i.e. updated on a regular basis. Static website discourage repeat visits. 5. Easily found in a web search

The single most important manner of marketing services today is developing a website which is carefully crafted to utilize the powerful search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. The vehicle to accomplish that is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) management. That is the focus of this plan and proposal.

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Adrian Nonprofit Consulting

ANC is a consulting service which brings together a unique set of comprehensive management and marketing skills and experience, focused on but not limited to nonprofit organizations. Web development has been an ongoing component of ANC, beginning in 1997 with the creation of a nonprofit website created solely by writing code, before the proliferation of web

development software. This foundational beginning has created an important understanding of the essential coding processes and functions of web development.

Marketing and multimedia skills are brought to bear from professional experience in the fields of radio broadcasting, advertising, audio and video production, voice-over and narration experience, and the associated requirements inherent in nonprofit management.

Nonprofit management has been the core component of a 40-year professional career. This brings a deep understanding of what works and what does not work in nonprofit management, especially with regard to interpersonal relations and organizational culture. This is every bit as important as planning and organization structure. Organization and program assessment is a strength of ANC.

This skillset enables the use of the word “unique” in accurately describing the comprehensive integrated services offered by Adrian Nonprofit Consulting.

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SEO Overview and Planning

The Importance of SEO Management

Search Engine Optimization is the process of structuring a website to gain more exposure in search engine results. More exposure in search engine results will ultimately lead to more visitors finding you for the right reasons and going to your website.

In today’s marketing environment, web search has become one of, if not the most important marketing techniques.

The Complexity of SEO Management

Several references are made within this overview to the need for keeping up with the rapid changes in web development and Search Engine Optimization standards and best practices.

SEO can sometimes feel like it stands for "Something Extremely Obscure," especially for busy marketers who just don't have the time to sit down and figure it all out. There are endless Google algorithm updates to stay on top of to ensure we're always showing up in search results for our target keywords, but as marketers, we don't always have time to keep up with those ever-changing rules.1

Search Engine Optimization Plan

A plan for SEO management must be developed.

SEO is not a one-time project, it’s a process that you’ll continue doing for the long haul. Approach this as a long-term process that builds long-term value. There’s a reason that all of those “ranked #1 in Google tomorrow” scams are called scams. It takes time to develop and execute on your strategy, to research your keywords, to create new unique content, to build more links and more authority, and to resolve any technical issues with your site. It’s a never-ending process, there’s always work to be done. For the first time in the history of marketing, users are offering up their actual intent through the words they type into search engines, and more than ever before you can measure the results of your SEO efforts as a marketing channel. You’ll need to spend

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the time, money and resources to do it the right way. Good SEO can essentially provide you a stream of some of the most targeted intentional traffic you could possibly ask for.2

There are two components to an SEO plan: 1) an initial assessment and implementation of essential SEO 2) an ongoing relationship.

I’ve found that SEO services are most commonly provided under a monthly retainer. -– Josh Steimle, Forbes Magazine.3

An initial SEO assessment must be implemented, whether or not an ongoing relationship with an outside SEO manager will be established. A plan must be created for the most effective and thorough implementation of the SEO management process.

Keyword Research, Analysis and Reporting

Keywords are the heart of search engine optimization. The perception that all which needs to be done is plug keywords into the keyword metadata in each page’s code is outdated and no longer effective. Search engines and indexes have advanced beyond searching this code. The process of researching effective keywords for your website is, as must be stated again – a process which continues over time.

There are a variety of Internet tools for keyword research. Keyword research is the process of analyzing potential and appropriate keywords for your website and understanding how to implement the results. Some programs are free but may have limited functionality, where paid programs will help drill down further in keyword research and implementation.

Google Analytics is a popular suite of SEO tools. Bing Webmaster Tools is another good tool, as Bing is a popular web search program. Examples of paid programs from other vendors are Raven SEO Tools, Moz, SEO Profiler, Majestic SEO, Web CEO Online and Coffee Cup’s Website Insight to name just a few.

2 Lynda.com “SEO Fundamentals”: chapters How SEO affects your business and Setting SEO expectations

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There are five components of keyword implementation: 1. Relevance 2. Search volume 3. Competition 4. Distribution 5. Evaluation

The number one objective of a search engine is to deliver the most relevant content. Close behind is search volume, which is the number of searches per month for a particular keyword. Competition refers to the difficulty in ranking ahead of competitive businesses or

organizations. Distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on your website. Evaluation is where the “long-term process” comes in. It refers to the study of how chosen keywords are performing.

Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines Version 5.0 from the first quarter of 2014 is a major re-write of what was once standard practice in SEO management. This report has initiated a new acronym: “EAT,” which stands for “Expertise, Authority and Trust.” These are three values that every website and SEO manager should strive to incorporate in their website content.4

A Cautionary Tale: New vs. Old SEO Practices

As with any new technology or opportunity, abuse is a potential problem which leads to a good concept going bad. SEO management has dramatically changed because of this issue.

Attention to the latest best practices is important. Not doing so could dig a very deep hole for a website domain from which extrication may be difficult or even impossible.

There are SEO techniques that were acceptable to early search engines but are not acceptable today. Most website owners think that including as many keywords as possible will result in their pages being recognized by search engine crawlers. Some go to the extent of repeating keywords in article titles, every subhead, and every

4Google Quality Rating Guidelines is a report used for Google contractors to manually review search results and send

that feedback to Google's team to improve the overall (search engine) algorithm. Search Engine Roundtable: seroundtable.com

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paragraph. Some write them in bold text or use them as text links. The latest Google algorithms now treat this as spam.5

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique, which leads to banning a website from major search engines either

temporarily or permanently. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content of a web page. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.6

Effective keyword use is about placement and density. The most important places for your keywords to appear are

Titles (browser tabs, which then shows up in search results)

Descriptions (internal code meta tag, which also then shows up in search results) Headings and Content (but with great attention to density guidelines)

Image file names (helps produce appropriate results in image results of search) URLs (page URLs)

These are the most highly scanned components of any web page. Titles and content keywords have the most effect on search results – the others not as much, but they are still important to implement. Density is careful use of keywords to avoid the appearance of keyword stuffing to search engines.

A good keyword density to strive for is 2% – 4%. An easy way to think about this is to break down your content by word count. To achieve a 2% density, you should include your SEO keyword of choice 2 times for every 100 words of content. Less than that and the search engines won’t really pick up on your keyword usage the way you would like. More than that and your SEO content may look like “keyword stuffing” to the search engine which could get you heavily penalized and actually hurt your search engine rankings.7

5creativemarket.com: The New SEO: Your Old Tactics Don't Work Anymore, Use These Instead 6Wikipedia: Keyword Stuffing

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Site Structure and Content

Structure

Search engines are most effective when great care has been given to writing and placing

content in a website and creating an organized and search-engine friendly structure to the site. Lacking these characteristics, search engines may not come back to your site as they otherwise might and they won’t be listing you very high in the results. Being buried in search results is like being invisible. The SEO manager must pay attention to effective use of text, links, images, audio and video with respect to the ease with which a search engine “crawls”8 a website.

Notable elements of websites which aid or help direct search engines are:

Sitemaps. These are very important if highly-ranked search results are desired.

Microformats or “schema.” This code markup helps search engines improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. It enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. It often directs search engines to specific items within the website such as a reference document, a tutorial, a report on a seminar, etc.

Robots.txt file. If there are directories in the website which you believe are

unimportant for search engines or robots9 to crawl or if you believe a directory has

information which is irrelevant or even misleading to search engines attempting to categorize your website, a robots.txt file is an important component. This can direct robots to not crawl or search these directories.

Unless you are proficient in understanding site maps, microformats and robots.txt files and have the time to develop and implement them on a continuing basis, the best scenario is having an SEO manager create these tools for you. The goal of these elements is to make it as easy as possible for search engines navigate, collect data, and remember your website.

8A Web crawler systematically browses the Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing. A Web crawler may also be

called a Web spider, an ant, or an automatic indexer.

9Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically.

Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses.

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Content Planning

An important strategy for growing search engine visibility is to continually generate new, unique and quality content.10

When it comes to content you write and publish on your website, there is nothing easier to understand than having content with which website visitors can identify. Content must be relevant to the visitor and it also must coordinate with keywords and the aforementioned search engine documents such as the site map, robots.txt file and microformats.

Regardless of how much time you have (or don’t have) to create new content, your website will automatically perform better in searches if there is user-generated content on your site. Examples are message boards and forums which allow visitors to contribute content. This of course would only be advisable if there is an approval process in place for each user entry. Someone must serve as a moderator in this scenario. Also, links to social media allow visitors to send your content to the social media of their choice. This is an excellent grass roots marketing tool (social media will be discussed on a subsequent page of this proposal). Programs like Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn among others are essential elements of a comprehensive online marketing strategy.

Identifying constituent demographics has always been important. There are new tools now for assisting with that as well. These tools have led to a new word in Internet marketing:

Technographics. This is part of the SEO marketing program which requires the participation of senior management. An SEO manager will not have the knowledge to be able to develop content which is relevant to the targeted audiences.

Another aspect of organization management providing for content planning is the creative aspect. Examples of this are:

White papers How-To articles

Statistics about the field Testimonials from clients

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Biographies of team members

Summaries of conferences or seminars you have led or hosted Client reviews of documents you have written

Don’t be discouraged if all this sounds confusing and difficult. It really is a bad news/good news situation. The emphasis is on the good news. You may perceive it to be bad news if you thought you would do all your website work. That may have been a valid consideration in 20th

Century web development, but not any longer. The good news is that this much more involved technology is available and is a tremendous tool for building and maintaining a much more successful business or organization.

As stated earlier, and worth repeating: It’s a never-ending process, there’s always work to be done.

Social Media

Social media is a great promotional tool. It is becoming more and more indispensable not only on its own, but also to drive traffic to your website where real potential client engagement takes place. There is no question that your business or organization will be better-served when you have a presence in at least the essential social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+.

Blogs have not declined in use or popularity as fast as some have predicted. Another important client and potential client engagement tool is to provide an RSS newsfeed link you your website. Subscribers will receive information from you without have to extend any effort to view your website or social media pages. They will, however, be more likely to make a repeat visit to your website when their newsfeed aggregate program receives your latest newsfeed post.

External and Internal Links

External: Having other websites with links pointing to your website is an important factor in building the “trust” of search engines. Not having any such external links will have a

deleterious effect on search engine results. Care must be exercised to be sure external links are quality links and not links from unrelated and perhaps even frivolous websites. There are snake-oil salesmen on the web who will offer to put a link to your website on a page they have created just for this kind of scam. This is to be avoided at all costs. It is not only a bad idea – it will hurt your web search results as well as your reputation.

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Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node. Inbound links were originally important (before the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today, their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is one of the factors considered by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the most important factors for determining that website's search engine ranking, popularity and importance. Google's description of its PageRank system, for instance, notes that "Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B." Knowledge of this form of search engine rankings has fueled a portion of the SEO industry commonly termed linkspam, where a company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to their site regardless of the context of the originating site.11

An external resource to consider are industry-specific directories and listing services. This must be carefully considered and researched. Generic submission services are almost always ineffective and best to avoid.

Internal: This is something over which you have much more control. These are navigational links and contextual links. They are part of the structure referred to earlier.

Measuring SEO Effectiveness

The goal of effective website optimization for web searches is measuring the results of the work done in this regard.

Anyone working in SEO that’s worth their paycheck should be keeping an eye on these metrics at a minimum, but this is really just scratching the surface. While attracting

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traffic to your website through your SEO program is certainly important, you also need to see what the traffic is actually doing once they get to your site.12

Web development and marketing must rely on continuous improvement. This can only be accomplished by knowing facts about web traffic/visitors.

SEO effectiveness reports will provide statistics and data on:

Who visits your website Where are visitors from

How often specific visitors return How long are the visits

What pages get the most activity What links are the most popular What backlinks have sent visitors

How effective social media is in sending visitors

What devices are used to visit, i.e. computers, tablets, smartphones Many other statistics and data

Every business or organization website should have a website analytic solution in place, one which is frequently used. Reports generated by these tools and analyzed by the SEO manager contribute to the continuous improvement of your website.

A Final Note: International SEO

Some areas of the world have dominant search engines other than U.S.-based services such as Google and Bing. In South America, Google averages well over 90% of the market share in search programs.

That said, consideration could be given to having a website with international clients translated for important target regions. This is a considerable effort. Thought should be given to whether or not the time and expense are worth the effort.

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Conclusion

Marketing trends change over time. In this age of internet technology dominating the

marketing environment, trends change over weeks – not “time.” Standards and best practices in web development and search engine optimization (SEO) change rapidly to keep pace with the rapid advancements in technology. A web search of the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” returns an overwhelming number of results. If an organization’s online marketing techniques are a year old, they are most likely outdated.

The day when web development and internet marketing could be handled by internal staff whose primary responsibilities lay elsewhere are over. Keeping up with the demands of technology for the good of an organization or business requires someone with skills in web development and SEO management.

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