The easiest form of SEO - Building a better website
January 03, 2012 | Shawn Smalley — View Recent Posts
Happy New Year! With each new year comes a new set of resolutions, most having to do with their website and how to get higher rankings. So this series (yes, a series) will focus on just that.
There are a lot of myths about how to “optimize” your website for search engines. Notice I put “optimize” in double-quotes. Here’s a truth that will make some paid SEO companies shake in their boots: The real trick to SEO is just building a better website in general. That’s it. Nothing technical, nothing “behind-the-scenes” you have to install or tweak, and your website is just a platform for you to impress your possible clients.
Some platforms can make it easier than others of course (and we’ll get into that as we talk further), but optimizing a site isn’t something you should have to handle as a separate task to launching your site anymore. It’s a matter of making sure you’re building your site centered around pleasing the visitors, and not just trying to impress the search engine “bots” that rank pages.
First off, I will say that SEO used to be way more technical than it is now. If I were writing this post in 2009 or earlier we’d have to get a little nerdy about things. Unfortunately, some of those old techy tactics are still buzzing around, but most of them just don’t work anymore (yet some companies still charge for such services because they know most consumers wouldn’t know any better). These days the search engines have started figuring out a few things about what people actually want when they’re searching. The general consensus is: If what you are about to do to your website wouldn’t benefit a human reader or otherwise make your website clearer or easier to navigate then why should the search engines care about it? They should start looking at what people want, not what they [the search engines] want.
There’s always buzz in the SEO/marketing sector for what works and what doesn’t, but I have a few key things that have never been in doubt and what they mean to you and your website. As I said, I’ll turn this into a series of posts, though, so we can make sure to give each tip ample background and explaining. It helps to not only understand what to do but also why it helps your website in general. Stay tuned....
