SEO Consult Blog

Undertaking SEO based on a home page alone is not enough.  This is only the beginning and it means that only your home page will get the benefit of better traffic from search engines.  If you have 100 pages on your website then you are only optimising 1% of your site.

Home Page SEO

If your website is very limited and consists of less than 10 pages then home page optimisation may be sufficiently lucrative for you.  If not you should consider optimising each page on the entire site.

While your website has a common thread, it won’t be easy to optimise all your keywords on just your home page as it changes often, so you should do SEO on each page separately, especially if your site is paid via advertising.  You will want to make sure that you optimise each and every page in your design, but perhaps not on sub pages with the same target words as your home page.  You want each web page to be optimised with separate words so that when someone lands on your page as a result of their search they are taken directly to the relevant page instead of only the home page.

Do Customers care about home pages?

When someone is taking the time to search for something specific they want a quick answer and home pages are the marketing vehicle which attracts people who are not really interested in your product.  So when you build your web pages make sure you build them to answer specific questions so that when someone clicks on your page they are not forced to continue searching.  SEO when conducted for each page will help your customers find exactly what they are looking with the minimum fuss and the minimum hassle which equals a satisfied, even impressed client who wont hesitate coming back again, perhaps next time they will have some spare time to navigate your links and find something else which might interest them.  The answer to whether or not customers care about home pages is dependent on what they are looking for.

Each page is an entry to more

When you change your perception toward your home page as being the beginning of a search you will begin to see things differently and you will begin to understand the importance of each page being viewed, from your perspective, as being an entry page too.  What happens is that you will start putting usable navigation on each and every page as well as your branding, telling your visitors who you are and where they are in relation to your site.

Your statistics will change too.  Where you were previously only concerned with the stats relating to your home page and not page views, conducting SEO on each page will allow you to watch the growth of your website as the big picture.

The more pages you have, the better your Search Engine Optimisation.   Once you get to understand the importance of each and every page being an entry page, you will start hankering after more pages.  Consider these stats compared to the stats if only your home page gets a hit once of twice a day.  If you have 1,000 pages, realistically you will get 1,000 hits per day compared to just one.  This is SEO, in a nutshell.

Without a doubt everyone wants the assurance that comes with knowing what future holds.  Some are even willing to spend their life savings to find out, however that is not necessary.

In SEO terms it is not possible to predict the future, nobody knows what the future of the Internet is, nor do they know what the future of online marketing is either.  The least that can be offered is some insight into future trends which may or may not affect the future of how online business will be conducted on the Internet.  This information comes from highly regarded ‘futurists’ within the online marketing community.

All we have is the word of a futurist

The first is that Internet news wires, or RSS feeds will soon be able to give online marketers messages to those prospects which have been targeted to receive them.

They also say that SEO is here to stay, it isn’t going away.  It is currently the most powerful tool for increasing the visibility someone who relies on the internet to market their product or services and this is not going to change anytime soon.  What may change though is where and how SEO web design will be implemented.

The ability to search regionally will become more widespread than it is presently.  Those search engines which currently target geographical areas will allow their users to locate products and services which are available locally are the ones that presently complicate SEO factors as depending which geographical area someone is searching from decides what results they are shown and which are based on their location.  The small but growing personalised search category may be the cause of more changes in the way SEO is conducted.

There is talk regarding a new technology which allows a search engine the ability to offer ‘pay per action’ services which will result in the advertiser being billed only when a prospect completes a desired action on their website.  ‘Pay per call’ will become more commonplace and will include a phone number in the search results.  The advertiser will pay for each call that has been initiated via the search engine.

The powerhouses in terms of search engines are starting to experience slower growth while second tier search engines are showing high growth in the number of searches. There is no need to get worried right now as one of the powerhouses, Google, still hold the number one position as they account for almost half of all searches, world wide.  Yahoo comes in second with around 25% of all searches and the balance is spread amongst all the second tier search engines.

Social media marketing

Social Media Marketing is a term that is becoming more popular.  It is in its budding stage right now but it should become more and more important to online marketers as technology moves forward.  What is it?  Social Media Marketing is a term which refers to marketing which comes in and which goes out to social online communities.  MySpace is an example of this type of community.  There is huge potential to deliver targeted messages to groups who have similar interests and which should yield enormous advantages and opportunities.

What’s left?

Research into what helps clients take advantage of opportunities is becoming more common and has resulted in a growth in shopping comparison sites.  There will also be newer online marketing campaigns which will integrate television, computer and cell phones and more and more advertisers will start driving their consumers to online content, or mobile marketing.