Why optimise your website for Search Engines

Why Optimise Your Website For Search Engines
When we get clients asking us not to optimise their website for search engines our response is always the same, our jaws drop. We quickly follow with, why? For many clients their decision is based on two main factors. The first is cost and the second is often a lack in understanding the term SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). In this article we are going to look at the reasons why SEO is important, the benefits of SEO and the drawback (yes there is really only one).

Firstly, let me explain the term SEO. SEO is the practice of constructing a website so that the content is accessible by search engines in the best possible structure and form. The result of great SEO should be a climb in the organic search engine rankings for specific keywords. Organic search engine rankings are the non-sponsored, free listings. SEO is different to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) where you bid on specific search terms, in order to be displayed high on sponsored listings. These are often found in the top three places or in side panels within the search results. Many clients mistakenly believe that these two listings (organic and PPC) are the same and this is normally one of the reasons behind our clients cost worries, as keyword bidding wars can be costly.

The practice of integrating many key SEO features is actually not much more time consuming than developing a website without these in mind. It's really down to knowledge; a web developer who has a good understanding of SEO will build websites with key SEO features already implemented and a developer with a poor understanding will often ignore this functionality. Every developer within the DUSZA team has been trained to a high level of understanding in both SEO and PPC. This enables us to develop every website with many key SEO features already implemented and frees up our SEO specialists, allowing them to concentrate on harder and often more rewarding SEO tasks. This delegation of SEO practices allows us to reduce the cost of basic SEO to almost nothing, thus massively increasing our clients SEO ROI (return on investment), in-fact it's so low basic SEO is a standard practice in every website we build.

With regards to our original question, many of our clients believe that basic SEO is an extra cost. They are under this impression because many agencies offer SEO implementation at a cost, which is understandable. As altering the code and structure of a website so that it is SEO friendly can be a timely task; of course this only applies to pre-built websites. Many clients don't realise basic SEO can just be another way of building a website, not an add-on. Of course there are some agencies that wish to charge extra whether they are altering a website or starting from scratch, which is rather cheeky. This also shows a lack of basic SEO knowledge. After explaining that basic SEO is included for no extra charge in all of our solutions our clients response is always the same, they jump for joy.

Let's look at the benefits of SEO for those who wish to further understand why we should all love SEO and for those who may need to invest in SEO on an existing website. We're first going to look at the sheer volume of users using search engines on the Internet. In March 2006 (and in just the US) over 200 million searches where performed by leading search engines (cite) every day. Considering that since March 2006 the number of Internet users worldwide has gone from 1 billion to nearly 1.3 billion (cite), it would be un-natural, to not want a slice of that cake. However, with so many different search engines which one to target has to be a consideration. For most this is obvious, with a 77% market share as of December 2007, Google is the clear winner. Fortunately for us though, a lot of basic SEO works across the board.

Is SEO really worth all the effort? This question should have been answered for you by now, but in case you're still unsure, yes it is. Even if you have a website and are already running PPC campaigns, SEO can still be beneficial and actually save you a lot of money. A fantastic SEO success story can be exemplified by one of our clients who came to us in 2007. They were spending in the region of £1000 a month on PPC and receiving a good volume of traffic because of it. However they wanted a website which not only reflected their business more accurately but also conveyed their products exceptionally well and performed in organic SEO results without the need for intense PPC campaigns. We developed a pioneering structure and coupled it with highly optimised content to match their targeted keywords. Their website now lists in the top three for each of their targeted key words and was so successful in the first few months that they decided to stop their PPC campaigns altogether as the demand for their services was so high.

This nicely leads me on to the only drawback, too much potential. It is possible to gain so much business via SEO that it could require you to scale back your SEO efforts whilst your business catches up. But can this really be considered a drawback? Is it really a bad thing that your business has to expand to meet the needs of new clients?

So there it is, put simply implementing basic SEO into a new build website requires little or in our case no cost and can reap superb reward. Implementing basic SEO on a current website can have cost implications but can still result in a positive ROI. However, in many cases the restructuring of a website to benefit from SEO can be more expensive than a new build. In either case DUSZA love to give guidance, which is why we offer a free consultation service.

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