Discovery Phase
The first step of any search engine optimization program with
561Media is the process of familiarizing ourselves with your brand and your industry. During this crucial step, one of
561Media's dedicated SEO specialists will discuss your company, its goals and the competitive landscape it operates in to help determine the most effective course of action for your customized search engine optimization strategy.
Research Phase
You may think you know your competition and industry like the back of your hand, and you may be correct. But numbers don't lie. We use best-in breed research hubs like the Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights and the W3C markup validator to ensure we concoct the best search engine optimization plan and keyword menu for your business. Let's face it, no two industries operate the same way, have the same level of competition or profit from the exact same sales funnel. At
561Media, our search engine optimization strategies are research and ROI driven; designed to be just as unique as your company.
Establishment Phase (months 1-3)
The early months of an effective search engine optimization campaign are all about establishing the brand online, collecting data and then further refining the campaign. During this period,
561Media's search engine marketing experts ensure that an efficient, malleable search engine optimization infrastructure is built-out. The core of this infrastructure is almost always a central website.
The following elements are essential to optimizing a website for modern search engines:
Head Section Optimization -
Optimizing the head section of a website plays a major role in giving search engines the basic information they need to index your site for terms that will bring you business.
Basic Meta tags - The title, description & keyword tags are always the starting point when optimizing a website for search. Not only do these tags offer useful information to search engines themselves, but because of the way browsers and search engines use them, they are important for users as well. Also, contrary to much skepticism, the keyword tag is still useful for many directories and smaller search engines, not to mention as a reference tool for our search engine optimization specialists.
Additional Meta Tags - Usually used on a per industry or per case basis, additional meta tags such as the robots meta tag, or copyright meta tag may be used.
Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags - With the introduction of Facebook's graph search came a necessity to optimize for social in a completely new way. Facebook introduced a whole toolkit for webmasters and SEOs looking to turn their websites into shareable objects. With Facebook's Meta tags installed on a website, an additional opportunity for search results and website traffic is available to your business.
Rel Tags - In website design, rel tags have traditionally been reserved for things like css and external scripts. Recently, several standards have emerged that allow SEOs to offer even more information to search engines such as original sources of content, authorship for articles and copyright information. These tools are often industry specific, or used on a case by case basis.
URL Optimization - One of the most time-tested and valuable techniques for search engine optimization is URL renaming. Our SEOs audit the entire site, renaming any static URLs to take advantage of geographic location and focus keywords.
Image Optimization - Images can offer a surprising amount of additional information to search engines. Our SEO specialists look at every image on your site, renaming the file and adding keyword driven ALT text as appropriate.
Directory/Search Engine Submission - It's no big secret that search engines value websites with lots of inbound links. Unfortunately many SEO companies have abused this practice and created a huge amount of sites that offer 'garbage links' or links that the major search engines essentially ignore, or even frown upon. At
561Media our SEOs submit websites to a solid base of directories and search engines that offer valuable, respectable links.
Measurement Tools - Without measurement, it is impossible to tell if what we are doing is working. At
561Media we install Google Analytics on every website we optimize to measure traffic and the results of our SEO initiatives.
We also go a step further, setting up Google & Bing Webmaster Tools and linking them to client websites so we can measure and adjust the behavior of search engines crawling sites.
Final Touches - To further measure and control search engine behavior on websites, our search engine optimization experts verify a sitemap and robots.txt file with Google/Bing Webmaster Tools for every site we optimize.
Maintenance/Adjustment Phase (months 4+)
Once your brand's website has been initially optimized for search engines, our job's not done. Your competition will always be struggling to beat you in search results, and any improvement they see in your website's search engine ranking will only further motivate them to improve their own results. With this said, It's incredibly important to maintain and further improve results.
Most of the work in maintaining good search results involves monitoring the landscape and making adjustments to meta tags, content, links, images and URLs. We also keep an eye open for submission opportunities, making sure websites receive a steady stream of fresh inbound links. Our search engine marketing specialists will also send you regular reports so you can see how you're ranking for important keywords, how your ranking has changed and to let you know what has been adjusted, and what further actions will/should be taken to improve results.
Building On The Fundamentals
As mentioned before, there is not a one size fits all solution for effective SEO. If you find one, it probably doesn't work very well.
The basics of
561Media's search engine optimization process works for most businesses, but when you commit to a search engine optimization campaign with
561Media, we always go a step further. We custom tailor all our search engine optimization campaigns to fit the specific business/industry of the client, using all the tools at our disposal.
Some examples of how different business models and industries search engine optimization plans may differ:
Ecommerce search engine optimization - Ecommerce sites often benefit greatly from Google Merchant Center product feed optimization. New structured data standards (more at: schema.org) can also greatly benefit an ecommerce site trying to get its products properly organized and indexed by search engines. Because ecommerce websites generally have to compete with very broad terms at the national or even international level, our marketing specialists almost always recommend online press release distribution to help jump start the ecommerce optimization process.
New Products/Event Based Industries - A company that has an exciting new product or specializes in events has a lot of potential for social media optimization. Building momentum on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Google Plus can greatly benefit a brand's notoriety, and with a well thought out linking plan, can give a central website a big push in search engine results.
Service Based Industries - Industries such as legal, medical, manufacturing etc. often do best with a fairly straightforward, local search optimization campaign. Efforts and marketing dollars are generally best spent targeting service areas and long tail keywords to produce the highest ROI possible. Also, an emphasis on submission to big directories such as Angie's List, Yelp, DMOZ, Etc., helps bring in additional traffic. In addition to organic SEO, a small boost with search ads or content network ads will often help increase traffic and results.
The Bottom Line... Your Bottom Line
At the end of the day, you want to make money. That's the end goal of any search engine marketing campaign or search engine optimization initiative. When you hire
561Media to handle your marketing, we will design a search engine marketing plan that fits your brand, your goals and your budget.
Contact us today to see how we can start driving more customers to your business!