ASTAARA MEDIA

Search Engine Optimization

The Purpose of Search Engine Optimization

The ultimate purpose of search engine optimization is to increase the volume of prequalified visitors to your website. A 'prequalified visitor' is anyone who is actively looking for what your website has to offer; they just need help to find it. These people are the ones most likely to respond to your site in a positive fashion once they arrive. They are your ‘target audience'. They are the visitors you want to attract.

The initial step involved in search engine optimization has nothing to do with meta tags, links, descriptions, keywords or content. The first step is to identify and understand your target audience.

All search engine optimization can promise, at its very best, is to generate prequalified visitors. You must decide ahead of time how you want to prequalify them. If you don't give this step the attention it deserves, as far as search engine optimization is concerned, you will be going nowhere fast. You'll be buried at the bottom of the heap or showing up for keywords no one cares about.

Target Your Search Engine Results

Always keep the focus of your website on one specific targeted group and you will be successful at search engine optimization. If there is another group of people you want to attract, then make a separate website for them. If you cannot define your target audience in one sentence, without using the word “and” (or some other conjunction), you are not ready to optimize your site.

For example, here, in the SmartWebSEO™ section of our website, our target audience is anyone interested in "learning about search engine optimization". Each subsequent page within this section specializes in a particular aspect of search engine optimization. Rather than optimizing the entire site for one set of keywords, we focus on individual pages. By clearly defining the content on an individual page, BEFORE we write it, we prequalify the audience we wish to attract.

With that in mind, the remainder of our optimization project becomes nearly self-explanatory. Each section within the website, and each page within a section, will have its own target audience. We pre-optimize each page according to the way its content relates to the people we'd like to attract. "Build it and they will come" only works if you build it to contain whatever 'they' came to see.

How Many Keywords?

It may seem like we are focusing on a rather trivial point, but it is surprising how many of our clients simply don't get it. Often, we are requested to optimize a website using the entire dictionary of keywords. Some clients want to attract massive amounts of undefined traffic to their site, "just in case". They want every single person in every part of the world to arrive at their doorstep. This would not work in the real world and it won't work in the virtual world either.

Go Backwards

The next step is going backwards to take a really hard look at the site you've developed. We recommend going to our SmartWebStart™ section for some guidance. If you've already built your site, you will need to test it on a live audience — people who already want you have to offer. Does your website stimulate those people to action once they arrive? Do they do what you expected? Is the website fulfill its purpose? DOES IT WORK?

Web site development and search engine optimization need to be a cooperative endeavor. Together, they address the bottom-line: performance. Many clients are surprised when, once we've raised them to the top on Google and they receive plenty of traffic, nothing happens. Why? Because, the site did not work and they were not willing to change it. They got the targeted audience but no one was interested.

What is there to learn from this? Test, test, test and test some more.  Be sure your site can do what you want it to, before fretting over keyword selection.

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