At Rouge we know that of the two, website marketing or the actual website itself, the website is the most important. After all, if you get a million visitors to a site and they don’t like what they see you are not going to make a single sale or obtain a lead.
A GREAT website is ESSENTIAL
So having established that a good fit for purpose site is a prerequisite (and for that you have to understand your customers needs and wants) we know move onto the issue of getting people to see it, after all, just as a poor website that is getting loads of traffic is useless, so it a fantastic site that is getting none…
Getting Traffic
There are many ways of getting visitors to a site, you can use Press Releases, Radio and TV advertising, email campaigns, plus of course good old networking, either in the flesh at meetings, or electronically on Google PLUS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like.
Search Engine Marketing
Of course there is also Search Engine Optimisation, or if you include Adwords and other Pay Per Click systems, Search Engine Marketing. These two are the main way in that most sites get their traffic, both of which rely on understanding, to some degree, the ‘keyword phrases’ that are being used in the site’s market place.
Keyword Research and SEO has changed dramatically
However, even though the way we find the words people are using has not changed that much (although the tools get ever more sophisticated and the words used in Social Media have become more important) the way that these words are used on the site has changed dramatically, it no longer being enough just to make sure they are on the page in the right way.
Thus it was very interesting to come across an article on the subject which goes over Then and Now in great detail. We don’t agree with all it says, and was mystified when it did not cover the importance of including all the words that mean the same thing (Synonyms) and how that is best achieved. However, saying that, it looks to be a great article and well worth the read:-
I caught myself in thought the other day thinking about the SEO of yesterday (more than five years ago) and how much tactics and strategy have changed over the years. Most would agree that SEO strategy isn’t quite as easy as it used to be. Specifically, keyword strategy has changed quite a bit. In this, we don’t plaster a site with keywords as much as we define the relevancy of high search volume terms, the content type that we have to create to captivate our audience, and finally how and who we will market that topic to. Pondering all of this, I thought it was a great change to compare keyword strategy within these two points in time and allow me to shed some ideas on how you can get in the “now” with your keyword strategy.
Then
I may have a few more gray hairs vs. my entry into the SEO world. Granted, nine years is not that long of a time, but it seems like it has been a lifetime of change in SEO strategy. SEO campaigns today have one main thing in common with the old days: keyword research. That is one thing that will never change. We have to create a baseline where we identify the keywords which are both relevant to our website but also have favorable search volume. If anything has changed within the mindset here, personally, I think it has been a move away from targeted a bunch of individual terms vs. targeting overarching subjects in today’s age.
One aspect of keyword strategy that I think has definitely changed is the execution beyond the keyword research phase. Once I had my keywords back in the day, the next step was to assign them to a relevant page via placement in page Title elements, H1/H2 headings, copy, internal links, ALT tags, etc. I really felt like that was the brunt of implementing targeted keyword tactics. While generating links to these respective pages was important back then, it was in no way comparable to the importance that it has today. While keyword strategy has changed quite a bit, it was easier back then, but I think today it is much more interesting and crafted around true marketing. Where we were obsessed with on-page integration, we have moved on to how we create buzz and social propellants to create awareness for keyword-relevant content which leads to traffic and links.
NowAs I mentioned, we must begin with finding what terms are applicable to our website/organization. I still use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner.
This has always, in my opinion, been the godfather of keyword research tools. It is always a first starting point in keyword research. From there, I move through other supporting keyword research tools
If you would like to see the full article on Keyword Research, please click the link!
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