Uncovering good techniques for SEO and demonstrating why it doesn't need to be confusing.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can feel a bit cloak and dagger, with specialists making claims about increasing your Google rankings and not divulging their techniques and even going as far as not demonstrating best practices. However, at Melon we are happy to show how the results were achieved.
Melon is a firm believer in the importance and potential of SEO and has demonstrated this by delivering successful campaigns for a variety of clients and our own website. By creating our own campaign and understanding the processes involved, we generate leads and enquiries that fit exactly the type of work we are looking for.
How we deliver Search Engine Optimisation?
Well, there is the good, the bad and the ugly of SEO techniques, we will use a variety of good (white hat) and occasionally borderline (grey hat), but never bad (black hat) practices. 'Black hat' methods might get quick, short term rankings, but could result in being sand boxed by Google. The dominance and influence of Google sometimes means repairing your online reputation is near on impossible.
The first phase involves identifying 'keywords' for your business and industry, basically understating what users are typing into search engines, this is not guess work, and we can access and demonstrate exact numbers, trends and statistics.
We generate a report which analyses the keywords and orders them into a simplified format. We can then identify the difficulty and potential of dozens of possible keywords, based on traffic, competition and relevancy. From this data we form a strategic campaign, targeting a range of key phrases which will deliver both shorter term ROI (helping fund the campaign) and achieve rankings for longer term heavy hitting searches - which could truly transform your business.
The SEO techniques we use
The way your website is built and how the content is laid out is an important factor, and helps immensely with your 'on-site' SEO. The ability to control your on-site SEO is something we have built in as a standard feature in our own CMS, Engine, allowing clients to amend and maintain keywords and meta descriptions. We have also produced a useful guide on how to create effective content for the web.
Although this is only part of the picture, once identifying keywords, our main techniques are:
- Article submissions – Writing articles based on your industry and submitting unique versions to multiple article directories and blogs.
- Blog commenting – Finding and sourcing relevant blogs, leaving comments with a link pointing to your site.
- Forum posts – Create profiles which contain links to your site. Also posting on forums with a link to your site.
- Web 2.0 site posting - Create profiles and post unique content to these sites, each having at least one link to your site. Each one is also promoted with social bookmarking and RSS feeds.
- Social bookmarking sites – these provide a quick link to the site.
- RSS feeds – Convert the client site into an RSS feed which we submit to RSS feed directories.
- Video – Create a video regarding your area of business and submit this to video directories such as YouTube.
- Squidoo lists submissions – sourcing current Squidoo lenses where it may be relevant to add your site.
- Online directories – listing your website and providing backlinks.
- Blog creation – Create your own blogs to link to clients site. This provides a strong link and sometimes we can gain rankings with this blog too.
- Competitor linking – we can see who links to your competitor sites and then try to add our own links to those sites.
We then generate a report each month, which allows you to review success and failures and for us to tweak the campaign each month. To guarantee we stay on track and relevant to your business, we constantly adapt and review our techniques for success.
Ready to try SEO?
Google does not share its algorithms and as such it's impossible to 'promise' results. However, it really does work - after all, how did you find us? SEO retains an important place in your online marketing strategy and can be a very cost effective way of attracting potential customers and contacts.
