One of the initial steps of optimising your site has to be a decision on what kind of optimisation you need. Although the techniques of SEO are many and varied, there are usually a set of techniques that apply to each site type. These need to be selected after careful thought at the very beginning of your search engine optimisation plan.

The choice of approaches can have an incredible effect on your site’s performance. Some businesses, after failing to really take the question into account, end up spending thousands needlessly chasing objectives that are just too far out of reach.

There are some types of sites that will quite obviously require a different approach from each other. E-commerce sites need an entirely different approach to a simple branded site. A blog will need different methods to a customer interface site. These distinctions are obvious, but the differences get more subtle as you go further into the various genres of sites.

For example, what happens if you use SEO techniques meant for a large site within a mini-site? Unless your SEO consultant has been particularly intelligent, the main result is a spammy looking site. The intended size of a site needs to be taken into account too, or smaller sites can grow out of hand with the excitement over building fresh content pages.

There is a lot of confusion caused by the SEO community’s obsession with rankings. Often, you will read commentary around the net on how an SEO expert got their client ranking top for a competitive keyword, or above the fold. This gives the impression that anything less than a first ranking is unthinkable. Not all businesses need to rank top in their competitive keywords, and most are happy to be on the first page.

Some businesses fall down because they’re trying too hard to compete. Just because you are in an industry, it doesn’t necessarily mean you wish to compete at the top of that industry. In a real-world example, a local chip shop wouldn’t necessarily take McDonald’s advertising into account in formulating their marketing plan.

Similarly, some businesses trip themselves up by aiming too low. A business with a large website has a lot more power to wield on the net if optimised properly. This means using the site’s many assets to their full potential, and making each page a uniquely strong support for the others. Running SEO techniques meant for smaller sites, like spreading topics throughout the site as a support, on such a site can lead to disaster.

The unique needs of your business need to be addressed at the very beginning of your SEO plan, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about SEO planning. A search engine optimisation professional can help you to choose your approach, but only if your business has realistic expectations from the start.

When approaching the search engine optimisation of your site, map out exactly what your objectives are and realistically consider where you want your site to go. If your aim is the stars, a plan will help your SEO consultant plot its course. If you need to keep things small, it will make it easier to prune back if your site grows too large under SEO attention.

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