What is SEO
A quick Google search for a definition of SEO will tell you it is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. In basic terms, it is optimizing a website so you can be found in a search engine. There are many “experts” that pin this term on businesses to lead them into thinking they will be on page 1 of Google for any search term they choose to go for. That is a misnomer of the truth. SEO encompasses a lot of different tasks. The best way to explain SEO is building a house.
Your Frame and Foundation
When you build a house, the first thing you must do is lay the foundation and build your frame. Without a sturdy foundation, your house is bound to fall at any time. In relation to a website, your frame is the framework you choose to build your website around. Our framework of choice is WordPress. Out of the box, WordPress is SEO friendly. It automatically incorporates the HTML, JavaScript and CSS built into the framework. With a little hand coding, it can become a robust web application with no problems. How does this affect SEO? When you launch a website one of the technical problems is proper tag optimization. This will help search engines “crawl” your site better, index your pages and rank your site according to relevant search terms. Using a content management system (CMS for short) like WordPress provides this right out of the box.
Interior Design
Now your house is built, time to start decorating! The design of your home (CSS) can drastically affect the feel and look (UI and UX) of your home. Think about it from an investors (client) perspective. When you are wanting to sell your house, it’s always a great idea to update the look to match current styles and trends. When you do that it makes the buyer enjoy the experience a lot more. It also gives them a better feel of how their future home would look. So why would you skip putting a quality design on your home? You wouldn’t. How does this affect SEO? When you build the user interface (UI) of a website, you should always do so with your clients in mind. How does a potential client feel (UX or user experience) when they visit your website? Remember, you only get one first impression. The user experience should be a important point when building your site. In relation to SEO, the more user-friendly your site is, the more people will use it and the higher your ranking will show on Google.
Curb Appeal
So let’s check off a few things:
- You have laid the foundation and built a quality frame.
- You have gone in and decorated the house to look and feel great.
What next? Now it’s time to work on the curb appeal. This is where the on-going part of SEO starts. Consider your home a model house for a new neighborhood. This model home represents your business. When you view a neighborhood the first thing you encounter is the curb appeal. How do the trees look? Is the grass neatly maintained? Are the bushes growing out of control? These are the things people consider when looking at a model home. How does that affect SEO? The same goes for your website. When your business attracts leads, does your message look the same on your website? Is information on the website hard to find? How does your social media look? A big one, what reviews can we find online? When was the last time they updated the site? Any new news or blog post? These are elements of curb appeal that attract new clients and keep existing ones coming back for more.
What is SEO not?
A common SEO myth is keywords. Many people are fooled into thinking that keywords = SEO and that is the furthest from the truth. Using the curb appeal example, keywords would be individual flowers in a flower bed. Too many flowers (keywords) and it looks like a forest. Not enough and the house looks vacant. Keywords are a small part of what SEO represents.
