You publish a business website to achieve a business outcome - usually to generate a lead or make a sale.

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.

Every now and then Google’s PPC machine serves up some irony.

Google will penalize a website found to be using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. But that doesn’t stop the ad machine from making a bit of money out of them

You run a business.

So you need to understand search engine optimization (SEO).

Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. You understand direct mail? I don’t mean in detail, not to be the one to actually run the campaign. But you know what it is, and what it can do for your business, and you can make decisions about it.

It is the same with SEO. You have to understand it because if you run a business that works online in pretty much any way at all, you are sure as hell going to be making decisions about SEO.

So, I’ve come up with a simple way of explaining what SEO is and how it works. (Well, you can be the judge of that anyway).

You can think of SEO like this.

The more relevant visits you get to your website, the better the chances you have of turning a lead or a sale.

You can get visits out of search engines two ways.

1. Advertise. You can pay to advertise, and pay for every click you get. Simple, quick and often effective. Paying for clicks is called search engine marketing (SEM) or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
2. Optimize. You can optimize your website for certain keywords so that people who click on ‘normal’ search engine results (not the sponsored/paid ads) have a better chance of seeing your website entries. This is search engine optimization (SEO).

Because there are so many websites jostling for attention, getting found in the organic search engine results can be difficult. There are so many factors that influence where particular web sites rank in search engine result pages.

If you are going to wind up paying someone for SEO, you can look at the money you pay as going into one of two areas: Technical SEO and Marketing SEO.

Technical SEO

There are a whole bunch of things a website can do to kill its chances in the search engine race. Technical SEO makes sure that a website can at least get to the starting blocks.

You would think every website in the world would do this already, but they don’t. Some websites can’t even be indexed by Google (and if you ain’t indexed, you ain’t getting found anytime soon).

Technical SEO means making sure that all your web pages can be indexed, that each page has a unique title and description, that web pages use headings properly, that special sitemap files are prepared so that search engines can read them … the list goes on.

Marketing SEO

Ok, so if that was Technical SEO, what is left?

Where to start, all the really, really hard stuff. You see, because there are SO MANY web pages out there (increasingly with very smart SEO folk advising them or working for them), just getting to the starting blocks isn’t enough.

You need to stand out from the crowd. Writing good content isn’t enough, you need to promote it so it is noticed, read and passed on to others.

Websites without other websites linking to them don’t have any authority. And Google likes authority. Google seems to love authority so much it goes all misty eyed with high authority web pages and puts them right at the front of the queue.

SEOs who are good at Marketing SEO know how to get not just any old links, but high authority links, the ones that turn their web pages into high authority web pages as well. All links are not created equal, and Marketing SEO is what you need if you want good links.

Since SEO is so competitive these days, Marketing SEO is also very concerned with competitive research. Where do your web pages rank, what competitive pages rank higher, how many visitors do they get and where from, how many links do they have and where from, how can I get some of those visitors and those links … and so on.

I could go on. But I won’t. SEO is a big field. The CPC (cost per click) of many paid ads is already prohibitively high for many. We may see temporary falls with the economies of the known world going into reverse, but as and when things recover, CPCs are likely to rise.

So at some point you may find you want to spend on SEO. Technical SEO is relatively easy, and if not for the way search engines work you could hire a Google Certified SEO Technician to ‘do’ your website.

But Marketing SEO, that won’t ever be as easy. Marketing SEO is the hard bit.

And that brings me back to direct mail. Direct mail is easy. Print some letters, whack them in a stamped, addressed envelope and you have done the job. But … anyone who has done direct mail knows that good creative matters. A great offer, presented by a true master of direct copywriting, will outsell a mere technically proficient letter.

And the same it is with Marketing SEO. The creative aspect is very different, and right now a lot harder to understand. And even when you understand it, hard to do well.

So if you need to spend money on SEO, figure out what you are getting for your money. Technical SEO is almost a one off fee, just make sure you know what you are getting and who is doing the work. You might even consider getting another Technical SEO to check the work.

Marketing SEO is going to be harder to negotiate. The top Marketing SEOs aren’t for hire, because they can make so much money for themselves why would they work for the likes of others.

Good Marketing SEOs can be found, but you may find you get what you pay for. Just like the rest of the world. Damn.