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The spin-off benefits of SEO

February 27, 2008

The goal of search engine optimisation (SEO) is to get your website prominently placed on the search engine results pages for as many relevant search terms as possible. In this context we’re looking at the organic listings on the left side of the results pages, not the paid advertising on the right side.

It’s easier said than done. The competition for popular search terms is fierce. It takes time and effort. There are no guarantees. But even if there is no obvious immediate success, the SEO process can still reap a number of indirect rewards. Here are a few spin-off benefits.

Keyword research will provide you with a list of the phrases that are most relevant with the least competition. As you dig deeper, you may start to find terms that are in your business sphere but have very little competition. These could be untapped niches for which it would be relatively easy to achieve high rankings. So keyword research could unveil new opportunities that you had not previously considered.
Link building is all about acquiring one-way links from relevant, quality websites. But even without the search engine benefits, these links will invariably refer more traffic directly to your site.
Making your site search engine friendly means providing navigation that the search engine robots can follow and content that they can easily index. Those same techniques will make your site more usable for human visitors. It will also be more readable by assistive technologies such as screen readers, thus benefiting disabled people and going some way towards meeting disability accessibility requirements.
Competitor analysis is simply the process of discovering your competitors’ keyword phrases and inbound links. But shouldn’t you be looking at the competition anyway? This exercise may uncover a wealth of useful information about what they are up to.

So with SEO you may discover new business lines, get more referral visits, keep more visitors on your site and steal a march on the competition. Prominent search engine rankings are almost a bonus!

Filed in: Search Engine Optimisation