SEO + Optimization
How to optimize your website to create more value for your audience and to increase your search engine ranking

Its not the color of your banner and logo, its not the font you choose to use and its not the your profile image that get you on top of your competition or keep you there. All of those have to do with it. If you have a winning smile and a friendly look people will be more likely to buy from you then from anyone looking just scary. That’s true. But there is more truth to be found.

Your online success is made by how well you optimize your website. You read that correctly. Most of your success is homemade!

Each successful entrepreneur needs to know whom he is selling to. He needs to know which group of people will most likely be interested in the value he has to offer. Those people will be his main target.

If your goal is to sell as many handmade guitars as possible using your website as your store, you need to find out what it is that defines your targeted group. Knowing that helps you to connect with those people and let them know about your best offer. Let’s assume for a moment, that your particular brand of pink, electric, hand made guitars appeals to young, female music fans with a creative edge to them. Those people will be your customers. But there might also be another group interested in your product. Around Christmastime it is a good idea to connect with the loving parents of those creative youth, desperately searching for the right gift. See, we already have another group to target. We could keep that up and come up with a lot more. But no matter how many more we can put to paper there will always be one more. The robots!

Just as much as we optimize your website for the groups of people we just defined, we also need to make sure we please the search robots Google, Yahoo and all the others send to check your website. Those robots care about totally different things then your human readers.

Optimizing your website for human readers

The first glimpse on your pages should tell the human reader what they can expect from you and your business and the second glimpse should excite them.

With your website we should stick to some basic principles of usability. You need to have a clear information structure. That involves at least providing an intuitive navigation.

The human brain thinks in images. Therefore images transport information a lot faster than text can. You still need good copy to explain the value of your product and service to clearly set yourself apart from similar vendors. But well chosen images are what make people care to read what you have to tell.

If you have a good knowledge of the people you try to reach you can optimize the appearance, functionality and the language used on your website to correspond with your target group.
The key motivator for the human visitors to listen to you or to buy from you is the value you are creating for them. There is just no way around that.
Optimizing for your human online community is to maximize amount value you can provide.

The more value you create and share the more regular readers, clients and customers you’ll have. Also the more those clients profit from your product the more likely they will let others know about you. They will share your website on social networking platforms (and use the sharing feature you would have on your website for that), tweet about you or blog about you.

Optimizing your website for search engines to increase your ranking

Different tactics need to be applied when optimizing your website for robot readers. They do not care about the color and form of your logo and they couldn’t care less about your smile in your profile image. They can’t see that. They are interested in a different kind of value. They are looking for pure information.

For one, well written code is going to improve your ranking. Only if the robots can follow your code and content without errors, you can be sure that all will get indexed. Also your code should be W3C compliant to work on all platforms.

We need to make sure that we structure the information on your website to clearly tell the robots what is important to us and what we would like to get indexed for. One way to accomplish that is the use of keywords in the headlines, the content, the images and the hyperlinks.

Adding as much information about your content as possible will pay off in the end. An example:

A hyperlink in HTML is written like this:

<a href=”DOMAIN YOU WANT TO LINK TO” title=”THE TITLE YOU WANT TO ASIGN TO THAT LINK”>TEXT USERS SHOULD BE ABLE TO CLICK ON</a>

Still a lot of websites don’t make use of the title tag in that structure. Not using that tag will result in your code not being valid. Even if the tag was used on many website I had a look at, that tag was simply left blank (with not content between the hyphens). It is just stupid to waste a chance like that. Robots care about that tag and it is our chance to tell them what that link is all about. We can even place keywords in there.

Let’s assume your website has 20 pages. Each of your pages holds three images, two internal links and one external link. If you are letting that chance to add that meta information to the images and links on those 20 pages pass by, you are letting 120 chances to get your keywords indexed go. Now lets do the same for all the links in your navigation and all the images in the header and building your layout. That can easily result in 300 or more pieces of information that robots could pick up if you only used that meta information.

Working with landing pages to provide more value and increase your search engine ranking even more

Landing pages have a bad reputation for all the spam and scam to be found online. But in fact, if done right and with responsibility, landing pages are great tools to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Landing pages are pages holding all possible information about a special topic. If your business is selling sports equipment, instead of simply praising your products you would set up landing pages for your website. Those landing pages would not explicitly talk about your products as such, but about activities for example. If you have the latest collection of hiking shoes on stock you’d create a page full hiking tips. You’d talk about which socks to use for hiking, which shoe to use for which terrain, you would educate your readers about how to strengthen their stamina and provide information about the very best hiking resorts in your area. If you have a lot more valuable information to share about the right way to pack a backpack, well then let’s set up a page for that, too.
What will happen is that you won’t only get found bye people explicitly searching for your products. But also you will get traffic from people looking for those subjects related to your products. And those people will have a look at what else you have to offer and might become your next customers.

There is a fine line between creating value on a large scale and spamming. Nobody enjoys getting spammed and I clearly don’t encourage you to do that. But if we create a website that gives you the tools to provide a ton of information to your readers there is nothing wrong with that. It is a win-win situation.

I know out of experience that there is so much that can be done that you easily get stuck and can’t see the forest for the trees.

No matter if your website already exists or if you are after a fresh start, I’m here to help. Together we will optimize your website for your human clientele and increase your search engine placement to skyrocket your traffic.