Project Startup Update Week 27 - The name of the game is SEO

Hey y'all - it's been awhile since I've blogged. Now that I am also blogging for the business website, chances to write are fewer and further in between. But, because this is not only a way to update some of you guys, but also a way to look back later and see how the business "grew up", I'm going to try to do at least one update a week.

Overall, up until the past couple of weeks, I've been still nailing down our operational model and figuring out processes -- the best way to follow up with sales leads, making sure our testing lab partner was using the right methods, tweaking the report analysis, creating invoice forms, etc. Most of that has been done, so now the emphasis is on getting the work out and creating awareness.

Nowadays, no business, no matter how small, can get by without a website. Especially for us, where credibility is key to customer acceptance, and in this market, where expatriates turn to the internet to find answers to their questions more than back at home, we had to create a very professional website, and one that would be current, relevant, popular, and most of all, highly ranked in searches. Enter SEO or search engine optimization. Up until two weeks ago, this was just a term. I had no idea what went into the mystical Google ranking algorithm. Then once the website launched and I started playing around with it, looking at what sort of traffic it was getting (or not getting), I figured I had to learn how to make the website more visible.

I sent out requests for help to a few local SEO service firms. These guys are experts at making your website show up higher in search results. After a solid week talking with them (having companies pitch to you is definitely the best way to quickly come up to speed), I have a little sense of the lay of the land.

How your website ranks is based on a number of things, a continuously changing algorithm that varies between different search engines. But in general, there are three things that affect this:

o Onsite factors – how well your website is built: the content, presence of a blog, the amount of keywords in the content, metadata built in, tags in the photos, etc.

o Off-site factors – the interaction of your site with the rest of the internet community: is it referenced by other sites and are those sites quality, is it indexed by the search engines so they can regularly “crawl” your site, is it present in directories, do you have guest blog content posted on other sites that reference your website.

o Search engine marketing (SEM) – you can simply and immediately improve your ranking by paying for advertising that increases your score

The results of running our site through a few free automated assessment tools (is a good one told us that the site was already built pretty well and didn't have a lot of room for easy technical improvement. That leaves content creation (mainly quality blog posts) and link-building as the main areas of work. But, the nature of SEO is that this takes a lot of time, so your rank comes up slowly even if you're doing all the right things. So, what I think we're going to do is to start by giving Google some money through buying some Adwords advertising and then using that to get us instant awareness and also find out what keywords are most effective. Then, we'll use that insight to inform our SEO efforts, and when we've organically built good links, content, and exposure on the internet, scale back inorganic SEM and use our own efforts to stay high on the rankings.

That's the idea anyways, and I think we have a decent shot at it because this space is pretty immature and there are not a lot of competitors who are seriously competing for page ranking in English for our kind of business. To illustrate, a week after the site launched, the first result of Googling "air testing shanghai" turned up a reference to our site from my friend's blog about air quality and our own site turned up at #6. This was without the site even being "indexed" by Google's automated web crawler or conscious efforts. So, by spending some time doing things right, we hopefully should be able to turn up on page one of search results for the main keywords we think people are searching for.

One cool thing happened today. I have some Google alerts set up to keep me up to date on any significant relevant news. In this morning's batch (keywords: China indoor air pollution), I found a blog post I wrote this weekend! Now, if I could only figure out how to get people to read those posts :) ....