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Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site!
Every web site owner wants more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. In the midst of an SEO campaign, however, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. So before you change a single title, you might want to shift your focus to answer some important questions.
So what do I mean by losing sight of the forest for the trees anyway? You’ve probably heard that expression since you were a teenager at least. You may even know that it means focusing on the details to the point that you lose sight of the big picture – and with the amount of detail work that goes into a proper SEO project, that’s easy to do.
Changing the questions you ask can shift your focus back to that bigger picture. You need to know what the big picture is before you do any search engine optimization, or you’ll waste a substantial amount of effort. Fortunately, you may only need to change a few words in the questions you already ask. Ease off just a little on the “what” and “how” questions and start asking a few “why” questions. I’ll give examples in the sections that follow.
I expect many of you will look at these questions and think that they should be asked well before a site goes live, very early in the design process. That’s probably true. But it’s also true that web sites evolve over time, rather like people.
They change, grow, and adapt to conditions in the marketplace. By the time a web site has been up for a couple of years (or even less), it might be a very different creature from what the site owner originally had in mind.
This kind of change is not a bad thing, per se. We all get a certain amount of satisfaction out of growing and tweaking our sites, and then watching what happens. If we’re not looking clearly at what the site is turning into, however, we can’t see what it needs.
Anthony Kirlew, who writes a blog called Old School SEO and has been in the search engine marketing business since 1999, wrote about these important questions recently. I’m not going to cover his fourth question – “how will they find our web site?” – because we all know the answer to that one: SEO, SEM, and maybe even SMO (social media optimization). Instead, we’ll look at a few “why” questions.
Why Would I Visit Your Web Site?
Why Would I Stay at your site and Do Business with You?
Why Would I Visit Your Website Again?
SEO doesn’t come over night. Since you’re going to be working on something for quite a while before you see success, you should choose to build your site around a subject about which you’re passionate. If you do it right, you’ll be doing it for a long time, so it really should be something you love.
The road to the top, in SEO as in other things, is rarely smooth. “If your site is less than 6 months old, expect fluctuations and concentrate on solidifying your niche instead of watching every keyword movement.”
On the other hand, you shouldn’t wait too long before you do something. Inaction can be as bad as taking too hasty action. Overanalyzing, hesitation, and procrastination are an SEO’s worst enemies. Time and Patience
Unique SEO Problems
Some of the special issues that newcomers to SEO face. One of the biggest revolves around the fact that the Internet is global, but its dominant language is still English (though that might not be true for much longer). As a result, many site builders who may not be skilled in English feel compelled to work in that language. Poor English skills can inflict native as well as non-native speakers. But they can wreak havoc on your web site.
Search for the phrase “SEO myths” in Google (without quotes) and you’ll get 243,000 hits. With all the major search engines keeping their algorithms under lock and key, and making modifications without notice, it’s no wonder that false beliefs get perpetuated.
SEO is Smoke and Mirrors
Like the client in the Ranked Hard cartoon, you might encounter a prospective customer who tried to work with another SEO company that was secretive about its practices. Maybe they were told “our tactics are proprietary” or “what we do is far too complicated to explain.” Your prospect might even have been burned by this other company, so they may be leery about dealing with you.
Real SEO is not smoke and mirrors; it’s not a scam, and it’s not merely “a collection of tricks to fool search engines,” as Lee Odden points out in another article which debunked several SEO myths. But it’s easy to see why some people would believe that. There really are a lot of scammers out there who make incredible promises but use devious methods and care only about getting their victims’ money.
Popular SEO Myths “SEO is All About Links, or Keywords”
Links are important, but how do you get those links in the first place? If you’re using link farms, exchanging links with sites that aren’t relevant, or engaging in other shady link practices, you won’t get the results you expect. In going for a huge quantity of links, it’s possible to forget that quality is very important. Many SEO experts say that a lower number of quality links will get you a higher ranking than a larger number of crappy links.
There are other myths that can be formatted this way. SEO company 2Disc.com notes a variation that says “SEO mainly consists of submission to (many) search engines.” There may have been a time when submission to search engines made sense; that time is long past. Even when it did make sense, it certainly didn’t mean that you would be instantly rewarded with a top position in the SERPs.
The opposite of the link myth says that SEO is all about keywords. To be specific, there’s a myth that says all you have to do is insert keywords in the meta tag to list your site for those words. Well, a lot of people started stuffing keywords into this tag, and the major search engines quickly became wise to this trick. So they don’t spider or index that meta tag anymore. In other words, don’t even bother with it.
Hits vs. Visitors on your Web Site
You know, a week doesn’t go by when an ad says, “Advertise with us as we get 1,000,000 hits each month.” But do they really? Probably not.
You see, a “hit” is an access request to a web server, not just a visitor. So, if a page has 99 tiny graphics which make up the web page, each view of that page registers as “100 hits”. And if the visitor views 5 pages, that one visitor will register 500 hits on the site.
This is why advertisers LOVE to tell you about hits because they know you think that means people when it really doesn’t.
Hits vs. Visitors: Getting a Real Count on Your Traffic
Ever see the claim “We get 80,000 hits a month” on a web site? Or the scrolling counter at the bottom of a page? What does it all mean and is it accurate? What is the difference between a hit and a visitor?
A “hit” is not a visitor to the web site, but a hit on the web server. A hit on the web server can be a graphic, java applet, the html file, etc. So, if a site has 79 small graphics on the page, every visitor to the site registers as 80 hits on the server (79 graphics plus the html file). In this case, 80,000 hits translates to just 1,000 visitors.
As webmasters, designers, business owners, SEOs, etc., we are not concerned with hits to a site. We want to know the number of visitors to our site. And we don’t just want to know about every visitor–we want to know about every unique visitor. So if we can’t count hits, can we use a counter?
The problem with using counters to track our visitors is they are set up to measure page views, not unique visitors. Everytime someone views your page, whether it’s the first time or the twentieth, that visitor is counted. And if the page times out for some reason and they “Reload,” it counts them again. And if someone just wants to have fun with your counter, they can exit and enter the site several times and are counted as a visitor each time–even if they never look at product.
So if you can’t count hits and you can’t use a counter, how do you track the traffic on your site? Use a web traffic analysis program. A web traffic analysis program will give you vital information about the traffic coming to your site, including where visitors are coming from, what paths your visitors are taking and which pages are the main exit points of your site.
Your SEO company or web host should automatically provide you with a traffic analysis program, but there are a lot of programs to choose from.
Search engine optimization can be a tiring task but with time it sure helps you get better traffic. Contact Jim Gras and SEO-Specialist-Online.Com for a Free Web Site Evaluation for your Business 800-897-6458 USA 44-2076-694183 LONDON, UK Skype: jamiboy for all your SEO needs.
