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Search Engine Optimisation and Business Indices
By Guy Mclaren
I don't normally write about SEO, because factually the subject is boring. I write about stuff that I am interested in. I figure that if I continually sell my business you are going to view me as another bloke with no real interest and no tact. SEO is the art of increasing traffic or traffic quality to your website. SEO scam artists will have you believe there is magic involved in what they do, but here is the thing a recent study by Thompsons in England pointed to the fact that 47% of British websites had any SEO done at all. Basic SEO is normally enough to get a localised business listed on the front page because secret number one. YOU ARE NOT COMPETING WITH THE WORLD if you have a local business. If you are based in Cape Town, Bloemfontein and Durban and you are supplying a service to your local community you don't need thousands of visitors a day from all sorts of exotic places. You should rather be getting the 3 or 4 people doing a local search for your business. Ranking for a search term like good year tyres is all good and well for a business like HI-Q in Nelspruit, but the majority of the traffic has no real benefit if it is from Cape Town, Johannesburg and Bloemfontein it has no value. Ranking for Nelspruit Tyres, Nelspruit shocks and Nelspruit Exhausts would be a far better bet. You will not be getting as many hits but the hits you are getting will lead to MORE SALES because they are applicable to your business. Traffic for the sake of traffic has no value. Having a website that gets 100's of visitor's but no real results is not an investment it's a cost. I would rather have 200 vistors with a 10% request for information rate than 20 000 visitors with a 20% spam rate and a .001% request for information rate. Facts are that people do not read the pages that are in front of them at all. I have a business index at http://lowveldnet.co.za that is starting to get some reasonable SEO results. We offer free listings for Mpumalanga South African based businesses. The free entry has an email only communication facility. at least 5 people a week click the contact us page and phone me about information for the companies that are listed free. At least 3 or 4 people a week will register businesses that are based outside the catchment despite big red warning saying only Mpumalanga based businesses need register. 50% of people that register will never confirm their email and add a profile even though it's FREE. only about 3% of the people I visit and leave details with will actually add their businesses to the site. What this means to you is that 95% of your competition are not serious about their businesses, well not on the web anyway. 95% of businesses that have web sites have them because their opposition does, because their clients need somewhere to see what they do, or because they have some document that they are tired of faxing so they made it downloadable. They are not taking advantage of the power of the web. Tell me in your small business would an extra query a day make a difference? two, three or even five? I focus on improving the quality of traffic to my websites and client sites. My client at http://mobilecranehire.co.za does not get lots of traffic, what he does get is targeted traffic that turns into sales and that makes him happy. If you need to hire a mobile crane in his catchment area you will find him and that's what counts. Here's a thing if you are based in Mpumalanga add your business to the lowveldnet free business index today. If you are in South Africa including Mpumalanga, go and add your business at the newly launched http://guaranteedsouthafrican.co.za
Guy McLaren has been married for ever(OK, only 19 years) He is a photographer and web developer based in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga and Pretoria, Gauteng South Africa
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I'm glad you mentioned the scam element of SEO.
There is so much nonsense spoken about SEO. If looked at brutally honestly, SEO is good only for selling the concept to those daft enough to buy it.
The efforts by internet marketers to game the system only create the need of the search engines to tighten up the way that they produce results.
Search results can look really good if you have a unique keyword (look at uppitytowntraders to see how I can demonstrate number one on Google for one of my web sites) but the result is only there if the person doing the search uses the keyword you are optimised for.
The reason SEO is so time consuming is that you have to optimise for as many search terms as possible - after all, you can optimise all you like but if no-one searches for one of your optimised keywords, you won't get much traffic unless you have lots of unique content. (Unique = original, NOT spun).
Local searches are one of the biggest cons perpetrated against small businesses. Very few people actually search for a product with their local town name - that's what classified ads are for. If you live in a town like mine, with a noun for a name (Coín), using the name in a search is masively counterproductive - try it.
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
Very few people search for a product with their town name? The quantity of searches for products related to specific locations may be low, but those are great searches to get found for. Seriously anyone searching foe nelspruit web design is more likely to spend money with me than some one searching for web design. Googles results are becoming more and more location relevant and if you are ranking for your location and product you are winning.
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