What is SEO?

Executive vs 5 Year Old

I am often asked to lecture at various conintuing education events. During which I may ask attendees, "Who knows more about their business? You? Or a 5-year-old with a lemonade stand?" As you might imagine, the gasps of the insulted supercharge the room. Then, I may go on to ask a second series of basic every day questions most website owners cannot answer such as: "What is the physical address of your web server?". Well, the 5-year-old knows exactly where his or her lemonade stand is. What are your content delivery speeds? The 5 year old can also answer this question with ease and so on. Can you?

Consider The "Network Neighborhood"

Would you build a Neiman Marcus in shanty town? I hope you answered no. If so, then why is the level of due dilligence for placing your website in a safe network neighborhood so low, or not even a consideration at all? You may wish to ask your current SEO the following questions:

SEO Questions

• Where is your web server?
• Who else is hosted on it?
• What is the host's reputation?
• Do you have a unique IP address?
• Who owned the IP address before us?
• Are you the fastest site for your keyword?

"Web Designers"

I get several calls a month from these so-called "web designers" who would like to place my photo or a testimonial from me on their websites or to endorse them in some other way. Perhaps they are scrambling for a solution for frustrated clients who have discovered the sites they built for them are not not going to anywhere near the top.

Usually, what these victims DO get from these "web-designers" is beautifully-designed websites that WILL NOT RANK ANYWHERE. Yet, clients continue to purchase what appears at the time to be a high performance race car, only to discover later that it is powered by a lawn mower engine! It might be a good idea to look under the hood and take those and many other factors into consideration. Suffice it to say I would NEVER get a web designer to build a website. I would get a competant SEO Expert and combine the process with the absolute goal of ranking in the search engines.

Who can you trust?

The pro golfer rarely uses the same club for every hole. Each website you optimize will be unique and require a different set of solutions. The SEO expert is a master of research and analytics and must gather data from trusted sources of information rather than SEO chat boards which are full of out of work "SEO messiahs" who have nothing better to do each day than to hang out on blogs or chat boards and direct your campaign.

Keyword Feng Shui

As stated earlier, SEO is not the moving of keywords around web pages. Although there is some attention paid to over-weighting and other details, the importance of micro managing those vectors seems trivial in comparision to the definiton of your nomenclature and the creation of origional content that provides the visitor with the best experience possible. I find it is more important how my visitors react to my client's website and how efficiently we connect with the visitors search querys. So to build a high ranking website, you should begin with great content and objects of engagement that resonate with your audience.

Just focus on text. Right?

Do you believe an award winning cake would tend to be made of award worthy ingredients? Do you believe that an award winning website should consist of quality, "award worthy" content, text, images, video and other componants? You should. And once you get on board with that concept, consider the following:

The SEO Cake

• Is your content great?
• Does analytics back up that conclusion?
• Are your embedded videos popular?
• Do your images rank high In Google/Bing image search?
• Content Delivery Speed - Who is your upstream provider?

Superlative Language

If you lie on your website you should not expect Google to feature it. Imagine a search engine with nothing but hype filled search results for every query. The team at Google do their very best to a positive user experience. If they send you organic search traffic, will you in turn provide transparency, honesty, and a unique yet positive experience? And if your answer is yes, then you are on the right track.

Superlative Content.

The use of superlative language can seriously affect your rankings. Stay clear of deceptive language such as: "The best XY ever" etc. These types of "est" permutations are superlative because they are subjective. Avoid the over-use of words ending in "est". Although there is no concrete proof that search engines pay much attention to this, I have designed crawlers that can measure the integrity of a website by the over use of superlatives. Please do not wait for someone to put in writing that jumping off buildings is bad for your health.