The Importance of Search Engine Optimization
Jul22 2009
A gorgeous, well crafted website is most everyone’s goal, and for good reason. This is the foundation in terms of marketing their business or organization. However, many fail to realize that it takes more than just a pretty face if you really want your website to have an impact. The most basic question you can ask yourself is “How are people going to find my site once it’s up?” The answer is easy: search engines. Did you know that 4 out of 5 new site visitors will arrive through search engines? Think about that number - that’s 80% of new visitors. If those new visitors can’t find you when they are searching, you are drastically reducing traffic to your new site.
Your new site rocks…nice! But what if no one can find it? 80% of new visitors to your site will arrive via search engines.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of improving a website’s visibility in search engines like Google. There are three basic areas of SEM: Search Engine Optimiztaion (SEO), Social Media Marketing and Paid Search. Threshold believes in doing everything possible to enhance your site “organically,” by maximizing elements that we have direct control over when developing a site. That falls under the banner of SEO, and the following is an outline of what some of those elements.
Content Is King
The single most important factor in any SEO process is your content. Regardless of any other steps that you take, if you want to generate and retain visitors, you’d better have original content that engages your target audience. It’s important to blend in keywords that will help your lead your visitors to your site, but the focus should always be on relevant, readable copy as opposed to just mashing together keywords in a vain attempt to climb up the search rankings. This isn’t always the easiest line to walk, so consider using a copywriter to help aid the process.
Clean Code
Your site’s code isn’t exactly the most exciting thing to think about, but it does matter a great deal to your SEO. Without boring you with the details, developing your site using web standards ensures reduced clutter via a separation of content and style. That means search engine spiders don’t have to wade thru chunks of code that they can’t do anything with. Instead, the spiders get served up exactly what they are after: structural markup that contains your content.
Domain Names & URLs
Thought it’s not always possible, purchasing a worthy domain name can be an invaluable step. The next time you search for something on Google, take a close look at the results that are returned. Notice how they search term you entered is highlighted in the domain name or URL of some of the returned results. Key words in the domain name do carry weight. That is to say, www.organicwidgets.com is inherently more beneficial to a maker of organic widgets than, say, www.johndoe.com would be.
The same holds true for the entire URL. It’s important for the structure of your site’s URLs to be human readable, and better yet to contain key words that relate to that page’s content, and avoid parameters if at all possible. So:
www.organicwidgets.com/portland/about-organic-widgets
vs.
www.organicwidets.com/about.php?sId=7&catId=6&langId=1.
Title Your Pages Appropriately
Page titles should be relevant, unique and descriptive as to that page’s content. A good rule of thumb here, just as everywhere else, is to focus on explaining the page in human readable fashion. The use of keywords is great, but don’t “spam” your page titles or it could backfire, and make your pages titles look silly at the same time.
Links, To & From
In an ideal world your site would have both inbound and outbound links to relevant sites. Are you a member of business associations, do you have peers or partners with liked minded content? Find out how to get your site linked from theirs. Search engines see these links as votes in what can easily be described as a popularity contest. It’s all about who you know, or more specifically who links to you / who you are linking to.
And Finally…Be Patient
Search rankings won’t be achieved over night, but they can be over time if you do things the right way. Is there more you can do? Certainly. We can walk you thru a bonfide SEM campaign to take everything to the next level. However, the items above are the first place any Search Engine Optimization project should start.
