SEO… SE-shmo … what is all the hype about, I have a website that’s enough for me. WRONG! Unless you only want people that can remember your website address you need to do at least some basic SEO. Some of the easy things that you can do include keywords, and meta-data.  So, what is SEO anyway? Search Engine Optimization is the process of making changes to your website to make them show up better on search engines. There are two main camps of SEO “black hat” and “white hat” and everything in between. Black-hatters use deceptive means to try to rank higher like having a webpage specifically written for spiders that is completely different than any user will see. White-hatters on the other hand use common practices and common sense in tandem to improve your site’s content and keywords so that the users can find the information that they are looking for. In general the Big three (Google, Yahoo, Bing/MSN) frown on making changes just to improve your ranking on the search engine without improving the user’s ability to find what they are looking for. This point is actually one of the main reasons that Google is changing their algorithm. In short, if it doesn’t allow a potential customer/user to find the information that they request then don’t do it!

At Next Step Computers we run a custom program over your site to determine a score based on best practices. For example, does your site have keywords listed in the meta-tags that are actually on the page itself? Just because you shove a bunch of words in the meta-tags, doesn’t make them KEYwords in the eye of search engines. There are also many free tools available that will tell you bits and pieces of the information that you need to accomplish a good SEO. One of the best tools comes from Google, Google Webmaster Tools.  There are many others, but through Google you can access a community that will help you with questions, the tools will give you information on true keyword usage on your site, etc.

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    My morning has been spent looking at websites as usual, but one thing I noticed is that a lot of sites have too many images or they are poorly optimized (if at all) for displaying on the web. This, as I have posted before, reduces the performance of the site making it load slower. This, in turn, causes potential customers to bounce. This is not good for business, nor the customer!

    Another flaw that I have seen is the website that is basically a Photoshoped image that has been exported as HTML and called a page. This may look great and exactly how you want the site to appear, but it is basically a ghost to the search engines. This is a HUGE problem, because as I posted earlier 85-90% of your traffic will come from a search engine. So, if the search engine cannot see information on your site, you automatically loose 85-90% of your potential customers. Having said this, there are ways that you can make the site more friendly to search engines, but the best way is to reduce the image to a minimum and use text where possible and CSS for design. The most important part being your contact information and a description of what you do.

   If you find yourself in this predicament don't panic, SEO! The basics of SEO will only help you, but will not be enough on their own. These basics include complete meta-tags and compelling content. Now, if this is Greek to you, hire a web developer (not designer) to complete these tasks for you. Once you have the information, the process is very quick and straight forward. Any good web developer will know the questions to ask you and know what content is needed to complete a basic SEO once looking at your site.
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