Search Engine Optimization

Comengine announces a new website productivity measurement service called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Comengine’s basic philosophy is to maximise the output from the resources within a business. These resources include the core physical assets of the facility and stock, the processes needed to drive a reasonable return on investment which includes the people who work within that framework.

Embedded within this approach is a review of the marketing efficiency. Getting the most out of every ¥ or $ spent can be a challenging exercise and one that advertising suppliers will avoid. Accountability for performance is the death of the advertising sales approach.

SEO fits into the measurement approach we take with every customer. We have developed a measurement tool that allows us to score a site on 10 different areas of productivity.

We used this SEO tool to measure our own site and found it to be very poor productively. Our site looked good but did nothing in terms of connecting to the people we needed to grow - customers.

After we found out the errors made in the delivered site we realized that the effort in getting it built was wasted – 3 months of negotiation and discussions went into the bin. No one had told us about the cool things you can do to maximise the impact in cyberspace without paying the large search engines to be high in the visibility stakes. We did not know and the site architect we used was not introducing it to us as a value added service.

We decided to start with a brand new site build straight away. We contacted several local (Shanghai based) web designers who were willing to do the work in 4 to 8 weeks – too long!

SOLUTION

Find a suitable site on-line and populate it with material from the original site and add more as time goes on. Let it evolve for awhile and when we are ready contact the web designers again when we can be more specific with regards to our needs. Better for them and better for us in terms of time, effort and expense.

STEP 1: We selected a free template design that best suited our needs.

NOTE: There are many thousands to choose from, some are free and others are nominal amounts of money. Why reinvent the wheel when they are there and ready to go?

STEP 2: Use the elements from the original site that we liked such as photographs and copy and put them into a logical sequence on the site to allow easy navigation.

NOTE: The new template design made this so much easier than building from scratch. We could see where our business offer went and how to use concise descriptions to make the point.

STEP 3: Use the SEO as the driver for the content material. This changes the way some things are displayed and dealt with. These are subtle things that to the un-initiated would be hard to see but they take the site from being a lame duck to a productive tool that will be seen by many more people.

NOTE: Once seen your offer is still key. Our initial site meant that we thought that we had a great offer that no one would ever see?

STEP 4: Further development of the site is handled by our staff. Part of the core requirement was that we could change the content easily ourselves.

NOTE: Making changes using staff internally means that the site should be fresh and up to date at all times.