Much of the link building done in search engine optimisation (SEO) focusses on  a site’s homepage. That’s all well and good, but doesn’t necessarily help the site owner make money.

And ultimately, SEO ought to be (but often isn’t) about making money by generating targeted traffic to a website.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that SEO is essentially useless as a marketing tool if the focus is merely to get a site’s homepage to the top of Google. SEO must be seen from a strategic perspective, rather than as an end in itself. And for the most part, SEO professionals have absolutely no idea where SEO fits into the overall marketing mix. The plain fact is, most SEO professionals have an IT rather than a marketing background.

A business owner must take a different view. His/her business plan will set an objective for the year, and it’s essential that s/he consider how SEO might contribute to that plan.

It’s simply not good enough to say SEO will generate X amount of traffic to the site, and we’ll make Y amount of money as a result. A far better approach is to consider the content on a website, and see whether or not its actually worth generating search engine traffic for it.

For example, I recently met a business owner with a 4 page website. The pages were…

1. Homepage
2. About us
3. Contact us
4. Links (a page of links to other businesses)

The owner of this site wanted me to get him to the top of Google. On examining his site it was immediately clear there was nothing likely to get visitors to pick up the phone and call the business.

I asked him how many visitors he got to the site currently. He didn’t know, but thought it might be a couple of hundred a month. I asked why he thought that. He said it was just a feeling.

I asked him how many calls he got from his site each day. He had no idea. I asked him when he last got a call from the website. He couldn’t remember.

This business owner has a general idea that getting to the top of Google must be a good thing. It isn’t. What’s the point of spending all that money for a site that is essentially guaranteed to fail as a marketing tool?

What’s required at this point is a Website Marketing Plan. This looks at the site as a contributor to the business, and will deem it to be one of the following…

1. A sales channel
2. A generator of leads

Once that has been established, content must be created that supports the site’s key objective (sales or leads). That content will normally be designed with SEO in mind. It’s not good enough to simply add a shopping cart, and then hope for the best.

In particular, certain pages on the site should be created to receive visitors generated by specific search terms. These are essentially landing pages designed to be attractive to search engine bots.

If it’s a sales site, they may also have to function as gateways to specific products or services. If it’s a lead generation site, they may also have to include a compelling offer and a call to action.

This type of content can’t be created by regular SEO guys. Neither is a web designer up to the task. It takes a unique talent to design this type of content – someone with both SEO and marketing expertise.

Once the content is in place, link building can begin. In this case, deep linking is required. That is, links are created to pages within a site rather than the homepage. Click here to see an example of a deep link.

The important points to know about deep linking are…

• The site’s homepage may also require link building to increase its credibility. This credibility can then flow to key pages within the site
• Many directories don’t allow links to any page other than a site’s homepage
• Google tends to prefer a site’s homepage. It may be necessary to generate more links than would otherwise be required
• Pages within a site that gain credibility with search engines (e.g. PageRank in Google) usually help the overall site gain credibility
• Internal and external contextual links are especially useful when it comes to deep linking

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