I woke up at 4:30 am today thinking about some of the challenges people face when building a web site. These are common challenges that small, medium, large companies face every day when building out or up their site.
What do I focus on first?
Am I fixing the right areas of my site in order for Google to recognize me?
How do I know if I am using Grey or Black hat techniques?
The list goes on and on!!
It’s actually pretty simple! Building a web site is similar to building a house you need a strong foundation, once the foundation is set you need sheetrock, paint, appliances, after the interior is set, now you focus on the yard, curb appeal.
SEO’s foundation:
The foundation of any web site should be sound, the technology that drives the site should be clean and friendly for the crawlers to navigate and index your site. The navigation should drive users and crawlers through your web site story it shouldn’t contain a lot of complied technology that hinders the crawlers. It doesn’t mean you can use Flash, Java, Ajax, etc. It just means use it sparingly and only as needed to engage users.
Use CSS to structure your page and navigation, theme your title, description, H1’s, H2’s and content. Make page accessible with a solid internal linking strategy. If a page is expiring, take the time to setup a redirect to another page, and absolutely use smart 404’s. If a user experiences a dead or bad link, provide them a way to get back to the site.
SEO’s Sheetrock and Interior
The interior is also very important to having a healthy site. The guts of your site should have a lot of rich story telling content. It should guide the user and the bot through your site seamlessly and not be too static and boring.
I watch HGTV and Flip this house and a commonly used saying is “paint your house to attract buyers” same concept for a site add content to attract your users, use social media to allow them to engage with their buddies, study your analytics weekly and change your content to adapt to the user. Make sure if the user is searching for a particular topic they land on a page that talks about that topic.
Put your imaginative hat on for a second. You’re walking through a house into the foyer and it’s grand, has marble floors, beautifully painted walls and ceilings, a big chandelier that lights up and leads you into the next room. As you’re walking into the next room there are two huge sets of stairs leading up to the upstairs, to the left of one stair is the dining room which leads into the kitchen. When you look to the right there is a living room which is can lead you to the study. This place is grand! It’s beautiful and each room is clearly defined (themed). This is how your site should be!!
A user should be able to land on any page of your site and clearly understand what that page is about and have the ability to easily navigate through the site. Now imagine if you were walking through the house and as you were walking into the living room you see a room off to the right side, the room from a distance looks like a theater room. You begin to walk towards that room and as you walk in the room a door closes behind you and you’re stuck in this room. It’s not a theater room but more of an old dingy storage room that hasn’t been used in a while, the windows are all boarded up and you can’t go back into the house. I would be pissed!! That is how a user feels when they find an old page that delivers up a clunky error with no way to navigate back to your site. Give the user the option to find their way back to you site. It’s all about USER EXPERIENCE.
SEO and Curb Appeal
So how does SEO relate to curb appeal? Through Social Media and a Solid Linking campaign! I will talk about this in more detail in the next couple of days.
I don’t claim to be a great writer however, I am extremely knowledgeable with SEO having been in the industry for 7 years working on small to large scale SEO and SEM campaigns. Feel free to ask me any questions.
Carl Burckhardt
