A few of these elements include:

- A business name

- A company logo that people can easily identify

- A message that tells your customers what your business is about (USP)

- Easy ways for your customers to get in touch with you (email, phone etc)

- Reasons and benefits on why people should deal with you

- A way to attract visitors and keep them coming back

- Ways to build credibility about your business (awards, features in
magazines, testimonials, a proven track record of success)

These elements combined create an image of a legitimate business that you
could buy from with little risk.

A real no brainer, right?

Let’s look at these elements and see how they compare on a website…

To get people to take action when they visit a website uses the same
principles as running a successful business. Without these core elements people
visit a website and leave confused and lacking confidence in using their
products and services.

As an example – When I start working with a new client I usually find their
website is on average losing 47% of all visitors without even looking at details
on their products and services. This means for every 100 people that walk into
your business, almost half of them turn around and walk straight out.

If this was happening to your business you’d start asking questions, yes?

Did you know that you can access this information easily for FREE.

Lesson Number 1 – Get Access To Your Websites Stats

When you look at your websites stats you can see immediately why your
customers are leaving right away. You can see what they are doing when they
visit your site.

Google have a really cool tool called Analytics that you can install on your
site for free which lays out your stats in a nice simple graphical method.

If you don’t understand how to read them, hire a person like me to show you
or to set up a simple summary that will give you a list of recommendations to
implement.

Lesson Number 2 – Apply Real World Rules To Your Website

Remember our successful business elements we mentioned earlier? The colour
and shape of these elements may change, but the same basic principle can be
applied to any component of a business, especially your website.

To make this nice and simple, I’m going to show you a simple, yet highly
effective checklist every well performing website uses to get customers to take
action when they visit their site. Compare this to your site and see how you
stack up.

These are proven techniques I have tested with many clients and have achieved
great success:

- Your logo clearly displayed on your site (normally top left hand corner)

- Your catchphrase under your logo (only one sentence, short and concise)

- Your main method of contact in the top right hand corner (this invites
people to do business with you)

- If you use images, don’t let them take up all the space and include a
benefit statement in the image (a picture is worth a thousand words, but are any
of those telling people why they should buy from you?)

- Have an offer (people will visit your site not ready to buy. If you make
the right offer you can capture their contact details and follow them up later)

By using these proven techniques and measuring your website stats you are on
course to a better performing website. Not only will these techniques make your
website easier to navigate, it will build credibility in the eyes of your
visitors.

Not only does it prove you know what you are doing as an SEO professional, but more importantly, you’re making the online world a better place by ensuring people browsing Google are finding the most relevant results. It’s sort of like you’re assisting in creating a Search Engine Results Utopia.

As I write this I can picture the comment from the movie Miss Congeniality when they asked each of the contestants ‘What does the society needs most?’ as each entrant replied with the same cliché line ‘World Peace’. Although world peace would be great, imagine an online world where people searching for their keywords are presented with exactly what they are after, first time round. This in my mind would be the online version of world peace.

World Peace Can’t Happen Overnight

Just as I understand world peace doesn’t happen overnight, I also understand creating a ‘Search Engine Results’ utopia also takes time and persistence. Google are constantly updating how they measure website rankings and although the basics are still the same, it’s safe to say the easiest way to get your website to the top and to stay there is through good old fashioned elbow grease.

This elbow grease I mention is in the form of a consistent series of repeated actions that you implement in a most boring repetitive fashion. At times it’s as exciting as watching grass grow, yet if you complete these steps you will slowly see your site emerge at the top.

These steps are the important and ensure the industry continues to grow and the Search Engines are able to refine their processes to give the end user the best result possible.

Can I Just Snap My Fingers And Appear At The Top Spot ?

In simple terms, there’s no magic pill when it comes to SEO. You may have heard that you can just waive a magic wand and appear at the top, but in all seriousness anyone who promises that kind of tom foolery will end up causing more long term damage than good. In other words; when on holiday you may experience a brief oceanfront visit as your concierge takes your bags to your room, but ultimately you’ll end up with the crappiest room at the back of the resort. Make Sense?

It simply takes Time!

How Long is Too Long?

Any good SEO company will explain the process they follow to achieve your desired result. The tricky part is whether you feel confident that they’re not just pulling your leg and telling you what you want to hear.

Putting that aside, we always say to clients not to expect any results for the first 3 months. When I say results I mean a good level of traffic and an increase in rankings. After all… we’re mixing together a fine selection of ingredients to bake a website that sits at the top of the search engines.

6 months and $470,000 on the bottom line

To protect the names of the innocent I’m not going to mention the client but I worked with these guys and they experienced a healthy return on investment when we worked together on their SEO campaign.

This was a property management business that engaged my services as an SEO specialist. Their campaign (as with every campaign) involved a lot of foundation work and took a healthy amount of time before they dominated the Search Engines for their target keywords.

There were a massive number of little tasks that needed to be performed and once these tasks compounded the end result was an excellent return on investment. A $470,000 return to be accurate.

As you would expect this result wasn’t immediate but once everything lined up the site took off and the rest is history.

SEO and World Peace

Although SEO can’t fix world peace it can bring us one step closer to more relevant search engine results and ensure businesses that are proactively updating their website with quality content will emerge at the top.

If you approach SEO with the intention of making the online world a better place and put in a lot of elbow grease you’ll find your website will be in it for the long haul. You never know… maybe one day when we create Search Engine Utopia you’ll to enter ‘World Peace’ into Google and the answer will show up first time.

It shows the strength of social media, especially when comments are re-tweeted and in certain circumstances, shown in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Sounds like a good idea for a person searching on a certain topic? If a particular subject is trending at any given time and the social world is interested then Google will tell you about it in their results. This is great!

On the 3rd of July they decided to stop using Twitter as a factor in social media trends with no real explanation. As you can read in this post by Cyrus Shepard in SEO Moz the theoretical intention is to start using Google+ as the social medium to replace twitter. Here’s the article here – http://mz.cm/owXtfx

In Cyrus’ article it shows a few examples of social media and its direct influence to the Search Engine Results Pages. The image below from this article demonstrates an example of pre 3rd July.

Will this impact my SEO and should I panic?

While this certainly demonstrates the importance of social media in any online campaign it doesn’t mean you should go out and set up a million campaigns and get a tonne of Google +1’s to your homepage. Aside from the fact that this is ‘black hat’ you’ll eventually get caught.

What it does demonstrate in some instances the importance of a solid social media profile and that it can potentially influence your position in the search engines. If you are serious in your online presence should you ensure you have a solid social platform? Maybe… in reality it could be overkill and you could end up spending a lot of time and money with your BDM or team member performing tasks that won’t actually give you any real measurable results.

Truth told, we are certainly recommending to certain clients that they look at their social media presence, especially if their SEO competition does the same and is doing it well.

Take a look at your competitors and see what they are doing. Like most Search Engines, in order to rank you don’t have to ‘do it all’; you simply have to do it a little better than your competition. By ensuring you’re keeping an eye on your competition (using social monitors) you’ll understand if now is the time to react, or if you should invest your time in other activities that offer a better return on investment.

The popularity of the internet has also paved a new horizon for businesses. Gone are the days when you’d grab your Yellow Pages and scour through, looking for the right business to fulfil your needs. So what is the new medium of today? Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’d understand it’s … Search Engines.

Please Note – In this article I am going to discuss Google as they are the main search engine that everyone wants to rank in right now (with an 86% global share).

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (also known as SEO), is a method that uses a series of different factors to achieve a high rank in the Search Engines. When you adhere to these different factors you can build credibility and influence a websites position in the Search Engines.

These factors are broken into 2 key areas:

• Foundation factors
• Evolving Factors

Let’s explore these 2 factors and gain a better understanding on how each one works.

Foundation Factors

These are a series of key factors that remain the same and are a major component of how your site ranks. If you’ve never actually heard about SEO till now than this may seem a little confusing, but I’ll try to explain it in a way that makes sense.

• On Page – These are adjustments you can make to your physical website that change the way Google sees it. When you make these changes Google can hone down to a particular topic or keyword you’re trying get them to notice. In other words, it let’s Google know what category your site fits into. If you look around you can find out many of these factors, but I’ll share them anyway. These main factors are – The Title, Description, Keyword Tags (this is very, very minor), Use of headlines, body text, bolded text, number of words on the page, domain name and descriptive Url’s. As I mentioned earlier, when you align all of these the right way you are effectively letting Google know what your site is about.
• Off Page – Once you complete the On Page factors it’s generally time to start working on Off Page. If the On Page factors tell Google what your site is about, the Off Page factors determine how credible your site is in comparison to the millions of other sites on your topic. This credibility factor is usually determined via a series of links (or endorsements) back to your site. The more reliable these links determines (in combination with your On Page factors) where your website should rank.

Evolving Factors

These factors (as the name would suggest) keep changing are determined by search engines and where / what they consider to be the best way to rank a site.

Over a decade ago in order to rank a site well on the search engines you would jam a whole lot of keywords on the bottom of your webpage and keyword tag and that would push you up to the top. As you would expect, people took advantage of this and started keyword stuffing their sites to rank well. In reaction to this the major search engines at the time changed and they began to dismiss (and sometimes penalised sites) when they keyword stuffed. This has evolved where Google now uses algorithms (a series of Formulas) to determine how a site should rank.

As of right now a few of the evolving factors Google are using to rank a website include:

• Social Media – links back from Facebook and twitter. These are called mentions
• Geographical Location of your website – If your website is hosted in the city you service, it will add credibility to your website and as a result your ranking
• Aged Domains – Old websites that have been around for a long time that have certain trust factors associated with them
• Style of Link – The way Google measures the type of Link or Endorsement you send back to your site is constantly changing.

Evolving factors usually occur as a reaction to the marketplace and to stay ahead of the dodgy people that try to cut corners or find the loophole.

So SEO important? It depends on how you look at it. If you’re looking at finding new clients and growing your business then you need to ask where you can go to get that business. The Internet is more used than Television, Radio, Newspapers and any other medium of communication available today.

More people use search engines than Yellow Pages, or any of the mediums mentioned above to research and find a product or service. Also, SEO gives the little and medium sized guys a chance to compete with big guys.

Well … You Decide.