SEO minimum requirements

Search engine optimization (SEO) services are not for every business. Paying a website optimization company a retainer to talk to search engines may not be the best next move.

If your business website is a billboard of what the business does, who does it with a light sprinkling of how it’s done you’re probably not too into the web anyway.  That website? It’s a virtual business card and chances are you’ve discovered there are better leads in more traditional channels.

In this case spending money on SEO services to investigate, recommend, build and manage a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is a waste of time and money. You simply won’t get a clear ROI for the effort. But that doesn’t mean SEO should be ignored. Your customers and your prospects should still be able to find you when they put your name or your trade into Google.

You should still seek to index well on your business name and the main few  search terms that most apply to your business. Your website and content should be applicable enough to generate voluntary linking and natural relevance to your industry. So you just need the basics. The basics let search engine robots crawl and understand your pages.

Here are 5 SEO techniques that meet the basics of SEO, those minimum requirements to optimizing your website. You can achieve this in a couple of hours and it should help you shoot past 99% of your competitors.

Actually, let’s face it. This is everything that many SEO services offer anyway. They just dress it up with documentation and jargon.

1. SEO Words

The first thing you need to know is what people are searching in relation to your business. You can find this out with the Google Keyword tool.

If my business is an SEO service I’d pick the most popular term, in this case “SEO” and then the next 6-9 most popular terms that are synonyms. The next most popular terms in this case are “seo optimization”, “search engines”, “search engine optimisation”, “search optimization”, “seo search”, “website optimization”.

2. The Title

See that thing on the blue bar of the browser that says “SEO minimum requirements”. That is the Title.

The Title is a meta tag in your page code that the browser reads when it hits the page. Between 6 and 10 pages on your website (if you’ve got 10 or more) should have a Title that clearly reflects the subject and content of that page, followed by your business name.

The code that makes it show up in the blue bar looks like this <title>SEO minimum requirements &laquo; Emissive</title>. The &laquo; is the reverse chevrons, you don’t need it, so leave it out.

Write some code like this in word or notepad for between 6 and 10 of your pages. If you can, try and cover most of those popular keywords identified in your keyword search. But only use them if they are relevant to your content.

IMPORTANT: don’t change your content too much to meet the keywords. Humans buy your goods, not search engine robots.

3. Page Title

As in the actual title of your page. This should be exactly the same as the subject described in the Title. In this case “SEO minimum requirements”.

Again, make sure it lines up with your page subject and content.

4. Meta Keywords

Keywords are like Titles. They exist in the pages code but in this case you don’t see them. Only the search engine robot.

Those search terms we looked up at the start and didn’t use? This is where you put them. Take the top terms, ensure they’re synonyms and chuck them in the code.

The keyword code looks like this <meta content=“Emissive, seo, seo optimization, search engines, search engine optimisation, search optimization, seo search, website optimization ” name=“Keywords”> which again you do for the pages you have chosen to optimize.

Do this for each page you are optimizing.

5. Meta Description

I’ve never met a description on a web page because again, it exists in the code but not on the page. The prerequisite for this highly technical code is being able to write a sentence and enclose it within some code.

It will look something like this <meta content=“The minimum requirements for search engine optimisation from Emissive.” name=“Description”> ensuring it actually meant something.

Do this for each page.

What’s next

Give your SEO work to your web developer and ask for it to be loaded into the chosen pages at the next release of the website. Or buy your web develop lunch and get it done that day. It should take them 30 minutes to do 6 pages at the most including testing.

After that SEO happens by itself

Let it happen. What most SEO services don’t tell you is that the search engines take over from here. If the robot crawls the page and the calculation of the search engine agrees, then you will rank well on the search engine.

If the page isn’t crawled and or the search engine does not agree then it won’t. This has more to do with the subject and content of the page than anything most SEO services can provide you. A reason for it not to crawl is that you have not told the search engine you exist. Submit your website here.

Some of your pages will optimize really well. Some won’t. However, what will happen is that you will rank very well on your business name. And your digital business card will be miles ahead of where you were at no cost, for little time.

Assessing demand on the internet

One of the most difficult things to understand when you are launching a website is the level of demand that exists for your ecommerce offering.

Many ecom websites dis-intermediate the supply process for products that have been established through real wold stores through traditional distribution. As a result there will be a wide number of distributors and retailers, and they aren’t going to willingly hand your their sales numbers to get a handle on demand.

You can purchase the information but it is often very expensive and may have little weight on the actual demand from internet shoppers. At start-up stage the business is also cash poor. Ballparks serve better than definitive figures in these instances. There is free information that can give you current demand on the internet, so you can use your money elsewhere.

Google keywords should be the first stop for assessing the interested and active market for your product. With some application of typical consumer behaviour, the way people use the internet and applying your own market position you can quickly assess the level of demand that can be tapped.

Take books as an example.  The UK saw 30 million searches for “books” in December with average search volumes of 15 million.  Many people will look at a number of suppliers if they have choice available, let’s say 4 suppliers, so there were at least 7.5 million people searching for a book, that did not already have a supplier in mind.

However, if I have a niche in children’s books, all of a sudden I’m looking at less than 2 million searches in December and less than 0.5 million potential uncommitted visitors.

But these only tell me half the story. There are also a lot of loyal, repeat customers of websites out there and they won’t use the search engines, they’ll go straight to the brand of choice.  I might believe I can take some of the business away with a better proposition so to complete a demand assessment I need to know what there traffic is. Getting these figures is more difficult without paying.

Go through press releases and visit industry websites like the IAB. According to a press (skite) release Amazon UK put through 15 million visitors leading up to Christmas. Books are a big part so we can start to make some ball park assumptions. People will often visit 2 or 3 times before purchase and Amazon has other products to sell. So lets be generous, add 2.5 million and there are probably at least 10 million people buying books online each month and about 0.6 million wanting children’s books.

You could also check alexa rankings or draw on free information published by Netratings, Hitwise (their retail data centre) or Deloitte’s to size up how much market share the internet has. All of these websites provide press releases and proportions of traffic that allow you to reverse engineer the actual numbers.

All up, current internet demand data describes a healthy demand for books in the UK and even niche opportunities like children’s books. These can be taken back and slotted in to any websites capacity planning, system scalability plans and market share targets and ultimately a business plan. And hopefully this blog post just saved some out there a few thousand dollars in research.