Tag Archives: Strategic Content Plan

SEO Outsourcing Strategies

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SEO outsourcing strategiesShould your small business outsource your website design and SEO work? Maybe you want more control over the resources and would like to have them located within your organization. Every company will have different SEO outsourcing strategies depending on their size and more importantly their objectives. At the extreme, if you just need a basic website, outsourcing is definitely the way to go. All you need to do is provide basic information about your company. An outsource website development company can have your website up in no time.

Conversely, a company that has a lot of content, changing content, and a specific target market may want to bring the content and web site development in house. Then there is the location of your SEO team and who they should report to. So many questions and all you want is a web site.

SEO Outsourcing Strategies

There are many different situations that will drive various SEO outsourcing strategies. The following are situations, economic, manpower, and expertise issues that should be considered in your decision. In every category, there needs to be someone accountable within the company who has a mandate to drive an online presence and controls the budget as well. If there is no budget it is a nonstarter as far as building a website.

If there is no leader or person accountable for the website regardless of who designs and builds it, the site may be doomed. Some people must take ownership of all of the decisions both technical as well as design. It does not mean they need to be experts in the field, but they do need to own the decisions and the process.

Small Companies – with few employees, they have little time to spend on the design, development, and maintenance of a site. Most will outsource these functions and rely on the outsource company to provide all of the necessary technical and SEO expertise.

Medium Size Companies

May have a small group or at least one resource dedicated to the online presence and website activities. Large projects will be outsourced, while day to day maintenance may be completed by this resource. He or she is still responsible for the overall design and development of the site and the content that is presented online. They need to work with other internal resources to make sure messages are clear and on target for whatever the objective of the site is.

Large companies – will often have a large in-house team responsible for everything to do with the company’s internal and external sites. They will interface with other members of the company to collect content ideas, marketing ideas, customer support information, etc. It is their job to make sure it is current and up to date.

Other Factors for SEO outsourcing strategies

Online Retail – these sites require a great deal of tweaking and customization to ensure they are current and up to date. Financial functions must run smoothly and accurately. Control, site design should definitely be in house. Outsource ongoing development efforts.

Information – sites are often more static and do not need the constant updating that many other sites require. Once the site is developed and online, the maintenance, etc can often be handled internally by single resources.

Security and Summary

Security – Responsibility is definitely internal, however, the field of security is complex and changing all of the time. Hackers will constantly be looking for ways to gain access to the companies server. Many companies employ an internal resource who may work closely with outsourced security resources.

All of these categories as well as internal company politics must be considered when you are developing your companies SEO outsourcing strategies.

 

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Strategic Content Plan

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Strategic Content PlanDeveloping a strategic content plan as part of your SEO responsibilities for a customer is actually much more complex than most people think. After all don’t you just have to have a couple of pages that talk about who your company is, the products and services they offer, and how to contact you? The answer is yes you need these things, but as most web masters for small and large companies know, you are just beginning to scratch the surface. In this post, we will list and discuss a few other topics that need to be thought about when a website is launched on behalf of a customer, or even yourself for that matter.

Strategic Content Plan – Areas to Focus On

  • Company Description – one page
  • Company Services and Product descriptions – many pages
  • Contact information – one page
  • Ordering information – one to several pages
  • FAQ-Frequently asked questions – one page to many
  • Customer reviews – one too many with approval?
  • Images of Products – one too many

The above is definitely important and must be included. However, there are other areas that should be thought about that are aimed at helping the search engines decide how to rank you against other similar web sites. These can include:

  • Linking to other websites
  • Links from other websites
  • Linking to customers, suppliers or even competitors
  • Quality of content
  • Length of pages in terms of text
  • Image control and linking
  • Tracking of customers on your site
  • Chat room capability
  • Content pages related to typical search terms
  • Search phrases and links to your site
  • Conversion rate tracking of visitors to paying customers

Some webmasters would suggest that there are well over a hundred variables that should be taken into account when developing a web site. Following the 80:20 rule, we believe that these are the major ones with the addition of one more.

Every page must offer useful content, informative and valuable content to the reader. Above all, you need to try to answer the question the reader is looking for. If you can do that you most likely will rank well and attract the kinds of customers you are looking for on your site.

 

 

Basic small business website strategy

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small business website strategyAll websites, regardless of whether they are for large companies or small businesses should always have a set of objectives. They should have a strategy for achieving those objectives. The objective should be geared towards whatever it is that they’re trying to achieve with the website. It should support your objectives to increase sales or to drive business to the company.

One area the web developer should pay particular attention to is the quality of the content, the freshness of the content, and the ability for the search engines to index their content.

We have all encountered websites where the content is almost next to useless. These have been written just to obtain search engine results. But they do not offer anything to the consumer or anyone searching on the Internet for a particular topic.

The search engines are trying to de-index these websites and this is the main reason why a website should have excellent content and why the content should be kept fresh.

Old content can quickly become out of date and as far as the search engines are concerned will be given a lower index rating as a result. In addition, if this content is about your products or services, business owners will want to ensure that the content is kept up-to-date and currently reflects the services and products that you offer.

We have developed the following strategy for keeping our content up-to-date on our own websites. Our websites are principally aimed at providing information to the consumer and therefore we recognize the value of that content is kept up-to-date and accurately reflecting current issues as well as information that consumers are looking for. Here’s our strategy.

Small Business Website Strategy – New Content

Depending on the subject of the website and reader interest, new content will be added at least twice a month and in some cases once a week to provide readers with new information about the subjects they are interested in. This also tells the search engines that new content is available to be indexed for consumers conducting searches on these particular topics on a regular basis.

Update Content

Older content should be reviewed and updated on regular basis to keep it current and fresh. There are several ways to do this. Our decision has been to focus on older content that is short duration. We also focus on older content that has not been touched for some time.

Posts are sorted based on size from smallest to largest. The smallest post is updated by adding more content. We increase it in size compared to the next smallest post. On average our posts will become larger overtime. At the same time, all punctuation and grammatical errors are corrected.

Tweak Content

Some of our posts already pretty good and just need to be updated. We want to show that they are still current to the search engine crawlers that crawl websites every second of every minute of every day. All posts are sorted based on the last time that they were updated. We then update the oldest post. We may add a few comments or improve the content of the post in some manner.

All of this work is aimed at keeping our website current. We are following these steps typically once a week or once every two weeks depending on the website.