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

This is in response to a question asked by MatthewK on a great article written by WebSite Magazine. I will be talking more about this subject in my next few blog posts.

If you structure your site using the Siloh method, your home page would only have links to the top tier pages of each category page. So your home page should only link to the Category 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. pages. If you use a left Nav on the home page it can be very confusing for the user and it will also pass the link juice to every page, making them all equal.

Our site uses a top Nav and left Nav as you dive deeper into the site and we make sure the top nav only links to the top tier pages. The left nav is used to get to lower level pages so it’s easy for the user to find what they are looking for and you are also passing the link juice to the right pages.

I hope this makes sense. If you have any questions please feel free to ask.

I don’t work for Website magazine I just came across the article and wanted to respond to your question.

This is in response to the following post by Patrick Curl Blog Post.

First of all SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not just “crazy keyword finders” @Angel, SEO embraces many important components and practices.  SEO will never be dead or trumped, it just evolves!

SEO is optimizing your site so it’s found for relevant search terms and then giving users a good experience after they’ve found your site. If a user has a good experience they will most likely link to your site, or they may use different Social Media channels to promote/share the content they liked on your site.  If used correctly, SEO and Social Media will boost your rankings and give you great results. However, if your focus is only Social Media, you lack good relevant themed content, and your site is not properly laid out using good coding practices. Your site will never be found in the search results.

Only those who don’t fully understand SEO will think SEO is stuffing thousands of keywords within your site and finding inefficient ways to get back links just to get ranking.  If you take the time to understand and use good SEO practices, such as:

• using good clean Semantic code
• creating quality themed content
• refreshing your site frequently with good content
• offer cross-links within your content to other relevant content within your site
• promoting through various Social Media channels

You will be successful.

Patrick Curl asked “is Social Media trumping SEO?” and the answer should be; SEO and Social Media are working together to give the user a great experience, while promoting and humanizing your brand.

Do you agree?