Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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PPC, you can expect quicker success than with organic SEO alone. But proceed with

extreme caution: If your site isn’t optimized for your target audience, it may not be an

effective destination for PPC visitors.

Cut reporting loose.

If you seriously don’t have the time, consider delegating your site

visibility check to someone else in your organization. Yes, this will seriously handicap

your ability to analyze and improve your campaign. But asking an administrative assis-

tant to gather numbers for you is better than not tracking at all. After all, if nobody’s

collecting information about your site’s performance, how do you know whether

you’re wasting what little time you

have to spend on SEO?

Do it all, but with a smaller scope.

If you’re low on time, do your slicing the way the

SEO consultants do: by limiting your campaign to fewer conversion goals, audiences,

or landing pages. For example, focus on only one product line or one landing page,

whittle down your top-priority keywords to just a couple, or focus on only one seg-

ment of your potential audience. In this way, you’re still working toward increasing

your targeted traffic using a holistic approach to SEO.

Be a dedicated dud-dropper.

We’d love to be able to list SEO tasks in order from the

best to worst effort-to-results ratios. But these factors vary widely from organization to

organization—one website’s success story is another’s sob story. So, you will need to

track your own results and figure out for yourself which SEO tactics are working for

you and which are wasting your time. Once you have some data under your belt, feel

free to slash and burn.

You may have the big idea to strip down Your SEO Plan to just focus on Google

ranks and nothing else. While this is a common sentiment expressed by clients we’ve

come across, it really isn’t a reasonable slacking mindset. There are couple of reasons

why you shouldn’t act on this kind of Google-centric instinct. For one, achieving good

ranks in Google for any meaningful keyphrase requires the opposite of slacking; it’s

hard work! And second,

In fact, a well-rounded approach to SEO is the

only

kind that will improve your

website’s ranks in Google. You can’t really strip out all but the Google-related tasks

and have less work to do.

Pearl of Wisdom:

Google does not exist in a vacuum.

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