Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Firstly, what do you want to achieve with SEO?

Let me cut to the core. What you need is visitors, in other words, TRAFFIC.

Now I am no spring chicken with SEO. For my old website for decorating six of my pages stood on page 1 spot 1 for the length of time they were indexed. That is no mean feat for a small website. There are basic rules which are simple - the one thing you cannot say is guaranteed to work.

In my work as a copywriter, SEO optimization is done for every reason apart from ranking. My current site ranks at around page 433 and I get visitors. Indeed, many of my pages aren't even indexed.

What you need is good quality traffic. You can't achieve that with SEO. You need to look at what your ideal customer wants. That means you have eliminated 50% of your traffic already - you have increased its quality though. Knowing who they are (and you will learn this as your website visitors come and go) and who the best ones are means that you can increase the quality of that traffic.

Now we are beginning to enter the realms where you can guarantee things. Because you have a good quality traffic stream means certain things that you can know. When you know things, you can guarantee them.

All this means buying traffic. Advertising. Start small, work up. As you make a profit, feed some back in and invest more. That way you make a little more profit. What is more, you can pretty well guarantee it - up to a certain point at least.

That money will also tell you who your best customers are which SEO will never do. You will find much more about this on the marketing pages of my website The Cat's Whiskers.

If you are determined to buy directory entries and the like, good luck. In any case, I wish you success

Moriarty xx

As The Cat's Whisker said, SEO should be defined in traffic. SEO involves giving your limiting better visibility on the search engine page, and the benefit of this is more people clicking through. The tracking could easily be done on your web site - showing how many more people click over to your page.

At a simpler level, an SEO package could also be judged based on improvement of placing in search engine listings. For example, that for important key words, your listing shows up on the first page of search engine listings. The assumption being that your site being listed earlier will bring more people clicking through to see your site (the end goal).