What is Search Engine Friendly?

When someone says the website, plugin or theme is search engine friendly, what they are really saying is that it can be crawled by search engine robots (also known as spiders). Examples of a search engine friendly website would be one that has a slider with live type floating over a background image rather than text being embedded in the image itself, a fast page-load speed to ensure a high page-load score or even securing restricted content from being indexed by search engines for hackers to find and exploit.

In other words, search engine friendly means it is discoverable to spiders, compliant to coding standards and secure from vulnerable indexing.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is the process of generating more volume of high quality traffic to your website from search engines via “natural” or “organic” search results for targeted keywords.

The words inserted into a search engine by the surfing public is called “keywords” or a “keyphrase”. With standard seo practices such as keyword analysis, competition analysis, content analysis and ongoing link building, you can unlock a new stream of revenue.

The number of site visitors you acquire will not only climb, but be composed of real prospects that are in your market, providing a higher conversion rate of people who actually call to action as opposed to leave your page (bounce rate).

Although there is no single approach that works for every website, there are a number of standards that every website must adhere to for optimal results.

If you’ve been let down with sad site traffic by your gorgeous website,
SEO might be the missing link.

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

Search engine marketing is the process of buying guaranteed views on the first page of results within Google or other search engines when possible. SEM is designed to help strengthen your SEO and accelerate the ranking process.

In layman’s terms, you pay to play and once you get famous you don’t need to pay anymore.

What is the SEO Process?

When working with Google (the only search engine that matters) it’s best to work on a 30 day timeline. The research and tweaking required to build a high quality sales funnel can take months even years to fulfill. You might ask if there is any way of speeding things up and to a point there is, it’s called search engine marketing (SEM) and it’s a form of paid advertising sold as ‘pay per click’ or ‘pay per impressions’. SEM can become very costly so it’s important to have your funnels properly designed so as not to waste time or money.

Step 1 – A SWOT analysis (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
This involves comparing the website being optimized to the websites it competes with in the marketplace (competitive analysis). Then comes the keyword research which leads to keyphrase selection (market analysis). We then review the website being optimized with the collected data and devise an SEO strategy (site analysis).

Step 2 – Optimize Site & Implement Strategy
We’ll need to open a Google Webmasters account (robots & spiders) and get a sitemap and robots file written for the website. We’ll also want to make our submission as “error free” as possible and then marry it to a Google Analytics account (visitors & conversions). This is where we set our goals for funnel and see how it performs in our next step.

Step 3 – Monitor Results & Write A Progress Report
Using our two Google products we will measure the results of our efforts in optimizing the website and compare how we rank against the competition. Steps 2 & 3 will become a monthly routine where we collect data, revise the data, optimize the data and then repeat until all our goals are achieved. SEO is a slow process if it’s going to be a lasting effort. SEM can however help realize them faster.