As he often does, Aaron Wall has posted something worth reading: Content Vs SEO: Business Profit Margins

In a nutshell, when running a business it isn’t enough to just publish good content and hope you will somehow profit. You need a business model, and you need marketing. Search marketing and content marketing are two of the four marketing groups that are so different online that they demand a new understanding and a new strategy (the others are email marketing and affiliate marketing).

Search engine optimization is widely misunderstood. It attracts criticism from two distinct groups: people who don’t understand it, and from people who do (and maybe know how to profit from getting attention). Criticising search engine optimization is like criticising press releases or advertisements – they are a part of marketing (and can be used well or poorly).

I still find it amazing that so many old school media organisations don’t make more money building on their offline assets.

Reminds me of the story of the ice cutters (see #8), as told by Guy Kawasaki.

Then again, maybe that is just the most efficient way to run out the profits from an existing investment. For News Corp, maybe the cost of transforming their existing assets is too high, so instead of wasting too much time or money trying they give money to Jeremy Phillips to invest in new stuff.

Overall, Guy’s advice is worth following: “Challenge the known and embrace the unknown.”

Or else.

Kalbarri Edge Engages Visitors

But you need to get visitors to your website first, and in most cases you want to maximise the amount of relevant search traffic to your website. Particularly Google (and in most cases, all people focus on is Google because the other search engines don’t have the market share).

When we launched the Kalbarri Edge website (a tourism website targeting visitors looking for Kalbarri accommodation), we were able to trace the performance of the website using analytics.

For any new website, there are some important things to look out for:

• Indexing: is the site indexed by Google yet? If you ain’t in the index, you ain’t in the race. The best way to speed up the indexing process is to earn links from other websites (and the more popular and higher authority the better).
• Titles: are the page titles unique and do they include your target keywords? If you ever want to rank for searches on antarctic suntan lotion, you better have a page that has those words in the page title.
• Descriptions: if your page is listed on a search engine result page, the meta description is probably going to be displayed under the title. A good description will help persuade more people to click through to your website.

Do you know how to check whether your site is indexed and what titles have been indexed? Go to Google.com and enter this query in the search box:

• site:yoursiteurl.com

Google will return a list of all the web pages it has indexed at yoursiteurl.com, showing you the indexed page title and description.

If you don’t see any pages indexed yet, go and earn some links.
If you see pages indexed and the titles aren’t unique or don’t include your keywords, fix them.
If you see page descriptions that won’t help click throughs, fix them.

We use the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress to allow titles to be over-ridden where necessary. If you aren’t using one of our sites, you need to find out how to adjust your page titles and meta descriptions.

So there you have it, that is how to launch a site and get initial search rankings. If you find that your pages aren’t ranking for target keywords, in the main you will need to look at the content (is it relevant to the title of the page?) and getting more good links to your site.

Getting good links is hard work, but very powerful. The topic for other other blog posts.

So there it is, to launch a new site and get it ranked, follow the instructions above. Use the site: command mentioned above and check out the analytics to see when visitors start to find you with keywords.