SEO - Somebody Else's Opinion?
Relevance
The being relevant thing is relatively straight forward - you just need to ensure that the content on your site is relevant to the types of searches which people who you want to visit your site are performing.
Your site needs to provide lots of relevant information, and this needs to be written for real humans to understand. And the more you change or add to the site, the better, since search engines will see that the site is active. A good way of doing this is through the use of a blog, press releases (even if you don't actually release them anywhere else), or case studies.
Gone are the days when you need to worry about things like "meta tags" and "keyword stuffing". Search engine technology has come a long way and is now really good at working out what your site is all about - as long as you give it enough content to do its thing.
Popularity
Being popular is more tricky, and it's also all relative. If there's a lot of big players in your market then they're likely to get all the press coverage, the case studies and people talking about them - so they'll be the most popular. For example, if you were a small media house, how well would you stack up against the BBC?
Search engines look for the number and the quality of links that link TO your site. So one very worth-while exercise is to get as many other relevant websites as possible to link to yours. It's no use putting a link to your site on a bubblegum manufacturer's site - there's no relevance - well, unless that's your trade of course.
The search engines also keep track of how authoritative each site is. So the BBC is a very authoritative, well visited and influential site, so a link from them to your site (for example in a piece of news) would carry a lot of weight. And the heavier the weight, the higher up the search engine rankings you come.
Another things that's useful is the use of social media, since search engines "like" all that stuff. If you were to do a blog on your site, or publish case studies or the like, then you'd use social media to promote them, providing a link back to your site.
No guarantees
All of this does represent some significant amount of work for it to have some impact. And there's no guarantees that any individual thing you do will actually give a positive benefit. But a whole range of different activities will improve your rankings.
Need some help? Want some ideas on the specifics? Give us a call.
