A Successful Search Engine Marketing Strategy

Without a successful Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy, your website will end up with tumbleweed flowing through it. Sad but true. With the exponential growth in internet usage, search engine optimisation is becoming an increasingly essential component of moving your business forward in these challenging times – a successful search engine marketing strategy will mean more traffic on your website, more exposure for your goods and services, and more conversions and sales that generate real revenue.

It very important to implement Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) from the beginning of development so that website architecture, coding, and design issues are addressed before the site is ready for release. Incorporating such components as easy-to-read HTML code, search engine friendly URLs, and keyword-rich content at the production stage,  will mean a site can start growing rankings as soon as it goes live. Although it takes time and effort to integrate a successful search engine marketing and optimisation strategy during development, it’s much easier (and cost-effective!) to plan wisely upfront than it is to fix it at a later stage.

The first step towards landing on the pages of Google is securing a visit from its web crawler called Googlebot. This indexing machine creates a copy of the website’s visited (or “crawled”) pages. The search engines will then arrange this content in its listings to provide the most appropriate results to users searching online. In order to rank well, a website must be developed in a way that allows the search engine’s robot to visit successfully, with as much ease and as often as possible.

Optimising a website during the development stage means making sure that your website architecture supports accessibility, with a structure that is easily understood by the Googlebot. Broken links, missing pages, frames, restricted pages and unreadable code can and will frustrate the search engine bots – and more importantly, any human users that visit the site.

Clean, efficient and standards-compliant code (W3C) is also critical for a successful engine marketing strategy as it enables crawling by serving content in a way that is easy for the search engine spiders to digest. Although search engines are getting more sophisticated and starting to be able to interpret Flash, Javascript, Ajax, and other advanced web technologies, Digital Orchard will ensure that the important components of the website are designed in HTML so that they can be accessed and crawled by the spiders on a regular basis.

Usable navigation is another critical part of a successful search engine optimised information architecture.  Easy-to-read HTML links allow both search engine spiders and humans to move through a website without confusion. As a matter of course, Digital Orchard will create complete a visible search engine friendly sitemap which notifies the search engines of all the website’s pages. We also create informative, keyword-rich and content which gives clear direction about what each specific page is about. No important page should be more than three clicks away for the Googlebot or indeed the user.

Content, Content, Content. When it comes to generating traffic for your website, CONTENT IS KING. We will work with you to make sure that your site contains keyword rich content which will meet the needs of prospective customers. You have to give visitors a reason to click that ‘BUY’ button or make that call.

Digital Orchard typically recommends the use of Google Adwords as part of a search engine marketing strategy. Google Adwords are ‘Pay Per Click’ advertisements on Google in which you literally only pay for the advertisement when a user actually clicks through to your website. It’s a no brainer. Trust us. Because there are no minimun costs involved in running a Google Adwords campaign, one can be designed to fit every marketing budget.

While developing and executing a successful search engine marketing strategy for your business can be a complicated process (don’t worry, we’ll do the ‘heaving lifting’), it is a vital investment and (if done correctly) will produce impressive results. Early and informed SEO planning can keep your business website from languishing on the web without visitors and becoming a missed opportunity. Digital Orchard’s thorough understanding of the importance of factors like accessibility and its experience in implementing  successful search engine marketing strategies into website architecture during development, improves rankings dramatically – boosting your Website’s visibility and making sure that potential customers find your site on the web.

To learn more about how Digital Orchard can build a winning search engine strategy for your business, call us now for a no obligations consultation on 052 6123359 or email us at info@digitalorchard.ie