Why Should I Optimize

The following is a reprint of a letter and response from a newsletter by Jill Whalen considered by many to be the leading lady of Search Engine Optimization. We agreed so much with her, we reprinted it here.

Jill,

I am planning to start a web design business, targeting small business
owners, within the next year.  I want to make sure that my clients
receive the best advice from me that they can about how to attract
visitors to their web sites.

I have searched the web high and low for an answer to my question
regarding the effectiveness of SEO, and have not found a satisfactory
answer.

Since my clients are going to be small business owners, and there are
gazillions of web sites relating to all of the search terms they could
possibly come up with, how can SEO help them?  What are the odds, even
with expertise such as yours, that they will achieve a ranking high
enough to enter the consciousness of their potential customers?

Thanks for your help,

Linda S.

++Jill's Reply++

Hi Linda,

This is a great question!

Obviously, the effectiveness of any SEO work is going to depend on the
knowledge and skills of the company performing the SEO, but if we
assume that they know what they're doing, of course SEO can be
effective for a small business!  SEO consultants and companies would
not still be around if they weren't actually increasing their clients'
traffic and sales.
Yes, there may be gazillions of sites competing for the search phrases
related to your client's site, but that's what keyword research is
for.  You're not going to get a small business site to rank highly for
a general one-word keyword, but who cares?  What you want to do is
carefully research your client's niche, then find the hundreds of
phrases that people are using to search for their products or
services.  Some of these phrases will be searched for hundreds of
times a day, and others will be searched on just a few times.
Regardless of the number of times, you want to optimize for those that
are the most relevant to what your client offers.

The biggest mistake made by rookie SEOs (and even some established
ones) is not doing a thorough job on keyword research.  Good keyword
research will take time -- lots of it; but I can't stress enough how

"key" this is to the success or failure of your optimization campaign.
Everything you do for SEO stems from this research. The site
architecture, the navigation, the link text, the copy on the pages,
the Title and Meta tags, as well as the directory descriptions, all
are determined by your choice of keyword phrases.  If you get them
right (and know what to do with them!), you almost can't fail.  Your
client's sites will definitely see their targeted traffic rise over
time, and if they've thought about conversions and usability, so will
their sales.

I wrote an article awhile back which chronicled the success of a few
of my small business clients, which you may be interested in.  It's
called "Search Engine Optimization and the Bottom Line" and can be
read here.

I highly recommend using Wordtracker for your keyword research.
However, if you dislike keyword research, or just don't understand how
to do it correctly, you may want to consider outsourcing it.  In fact,
I don't mind passing along my own keyword researcher, Lorelle Smith
(who also proofreads this newsletter).  Lorelle's lifelong passion for
words, combined with an ever-growing vocabulary, gives her an edge
when it comes to conducting keyword research, and she does a great job
with it!  Feel free to email me and I'll put you in contact with her
if you'd like more info.

Hope this helps!

Jill