Introduction

As an introduction, for some background about SEO, you can look first at this presentation made by Rand Fishkin, the CEO and Co-founder of SEOMoz.

Web audit

As a general rule, a strategic web audit is often the first step of any SEO service. Its purpose  is to web presence of a website  in order to identify  areas where a better technical delivery can be achieved. A comprehensive web audit is the most effective way of ensuring a website to be crawlable, indexable and accessible by both search engines spiders and visitors.

While it often requires technical skills, a web audit needs to take into account the sector in which a company is evolving as well as its strategy towards its competitors. A professional SEO will thus cross technical, web analytics and marketing data to provide the most operational recommendations.

Once fixed the main technical issue and defined a coherent web strategy, the next logical steps is to improve the rankings of a website on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) through on-site SEO.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO refers techniques that are performed on a website,  and are thus called « on-site ». Typically, on-site SEO follows a web audit and focuses on the optimization of the overall architecture, structure and content of a website. In particular, such services as keyword research, analysis and optimization are performed. The latter one usually needs to be combined with effective copywriting. But it often needs to be completed by a link-building campaign in order to be effective.

Off-site SEO

Off-site SEO refers to techniques that are not performed on a website, and are thus called « off-site. » Indeed, to improve effectively the rankings of a website, one needs the acquisition of incoming links, commonly referred to as backlinks. This is often one of the most difficult part of a SEO consultant.

SMO (Social Media Optimization)

More and more, especially since the last update of Google’s algorithm, SMO needs to be performed in order to improve the visibility of a website on social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

I hope this article gives you a good overview of the SEO process. As you can see, SEO requires mainly skills in order to make your website a success. It often needs to combine analytical, marketing and communication aspects in order to be efficient. In comparison to other traditional marketing services, SEO is still cheaper and far more effective.

1999-2002

• On-page optimization was the most important factor
• PageRank had a real ranking influence at that time

•  Anchor text became of utmost importance to implement link-building campaign
• Keyword match domain was still of importance as well as its history along time

The situation in Belgium

Indeed, one has to remember that there are three official languages: French, Flemish and German (although the latter one is only spoken by a tiny minority). What makes things more complicated is that Brussels, the capital of Belgium, is also the capital of the European Union. Hence, the three main institutions of the EU – the Council of the European Union, the European Commission and European Parliament – are located in Brussels. The « EU quarter » is also surrounded by thousands of interest groups trying to influence to the decision-making process. Needless to say that the predominant language in this European’s affairs small world is English.

Brussels is a Babel Tower for SEO!

Consequences on SEO in Brussels

In the case of the creation and optimization of a typical website in Brussels, targeted audience in at least four languages, below are the consequences.

1. First, the domain name chosen has be neutral, preferably in English in order not to offend any community. So do not be surprised if, for example, the domain name chosen for the official Belgian Government portal is Belgium.be.
2. Then, the specifications regarding the creation of a website in Belgium has to integrate the multilinguism issue which has to be reflected in the core architecture of the website. The architecture has to be consistent to ensure the accessibility and indexability of the webiste in the different languages.
3. Needless to say that it has severe budget implications on the creation of the website regarding its technical development, the production of its content and its overall online promotion (SEO, SEM and SMO). As you can see, in terms of project / budget management, the reality of multilinguism makes SEO far more challenging that in any country of Europe. This is also why doing search engine optimization in Brussels at an expert level requires multiple skills.

Briefly, we can say that there are 5 major steps in terms of SEO.

1. SEO began with search engine submission in the early days due to the fact that search engines had limited crawling capabilities.
2. Then, it turned into on-page SEO, meaning the art of ensuring a website is technically accessible to search engines and relevant to the targeted keywords.
3. Since Google – which quickly became the major search engine from 2000 – introduced its notion of PageRank, the acquisition of quality back links the dominant factor in the early years of the decade.
4. In order to face link spam, Google algorithm began to take into account contextual information of a backlink and especially its  anchor text.
5. In the same logic, the notion of TrustRank appears meaning that the more a backlink comes from a trusted sources  the more it is valuable. Domain authority mainly came from the age of the domain name.
6. Link context became more and more important mainly because link exchanges. Google started to consider that the placement of links on a page and, more importantly, the context of the page and the site the link is on is of utmost importance .
7. Additionnaly, user signals – such as click through rates, bounce rates and search patterns – became to be taken into account by search engines to assess the level of trust search engines have in a site.
8. Finally, major search engines – among which Google is the more advanced – decided to include multimedia and real-time content to match better user’s needs.

See below for more details:

SEO History (1994-2001) - Greenlight

SEO History 2 (2002-2009) - Greenlight

The Taraxacum's Paradigm in Online Communications

Multi-Channel Communication Strategy: The Taraxacum’s Paradigm

This is an interesting metaphor to illustrate how your communications should spread. Once defined accordingly to your target audience, your key messages should flow through different channels – combining offline and online means. Such a process could be named « taraxacoms ».

Taraxacoms, an eMarketing Consultancy dedicated to Social Media in European Affairs

The original concept was first brought by Antoine Peeters – a Brussels-based social media expert – who recently created his own consultancy Taraxacoms. Having met him, I strongly advise you to attend his regular workshops on social media to better understand its impact on European affairs.

European Affairs and SMO (Social Media Optimization)

In this context, social media plays a major role to help you increase your online visibility. While you should also aim for optimizing your online press releases, the strategic use of social media will multiply the gates to which your messages can be discovered by your target groups.

Hereby, comes the concept of SMO (Social Media Optimization) a subset of Social Media Marketing (SMM) consisting into promoting a brand, a product or a service through social media. Generally speaking, SMO is also ideal for Online Reputation Management (ORL).

I will not comment on the content of this conference, where I didn’t learn so much about SEO.  I would rather concentrate on aspects a bit more anecdotal, such as Google offices in Brussels or meeting with Matt Cutts.

About Google Belgium

For your information, the Google Belgium’s offices are located at Chaussee d’Etterbeek, 180, near Parc Leopold, at the heart of the EU quarter. This is not trivial, as one of the reasons of Google being present Belgium is that Google Inc. is not only interested to develop is business over here. Google Inc. also wants to better to better understand the European institutions to eventually lobby the EU policy-making process.

Indeed, this is hardly a secret that the Google Inc.’s privacy policy is not so much appreciated by the EU institutions. Google’s office in Brussels is therefore also dedicated to better inform EU decision-markers and EU of Google’s intentions. By the way, I strongly recommend you to read the Google Europe Policy Blog which aims at explaining Google’s view on EU policies. It is a quite interesting way to mix public relations, public affairs and web 2.0.

Matt cutts and myself at Google Belgium

About Matt Cutts

As an engineer, Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group at Google Inc., specializing in SEO issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and advising the public on how to get better website visibility on the SERPs.

As far as I am concerned, I was impressed by passion and ease in communicating complex SEO issues and especially its high availability. He answered all the questions from the public. More than that, he agreed to be photographed with Gregory and myself. He even accepted to answer a personal question about the way spam report works. The video will soon be published. What a day!

Question asked to Matt Cutts

Edit: Below is the famous video featuring Matt Cutts with myself asking the following question: How long does it take for a spam report to be taken into account by Google?

Conclusion: Be online, be visible, be influent online!

In any case, it conforts me that EU lobbyists must really integrate in their strategy eMarketing tools such as Web Analytics, SEO, SEM or SMO. Nowadays, these tools are becoming more and more essential to influence key EU decision-makers and stakeholders.

Choosing an SEO consultant, SEOmoz weekly Friday whiteboard

If you are facing this problem, we strongly recommend that you take a look a this very instructive video from SEOmoz consultants. And, in any case, if you need to hire an SEO consultant, don’t hesitate to contact us. Especially, we specialized into SEO in Brussels.