Knowing Enough to Recognize Quality

Part 2 of a 3 part series.

SEO can be a confusing and obscure profession. It is just technical enough, and just controversial enough, that trying to learn it to start is confusing! It changes so fast that if you are reading a book off the shelf, chances are your information (or at least part of it) is outdated. In order to do it well, you have to keep up with the changes, and stay involved in the arena.

There are all kinds of people out there offering SEO services. But not all of them know what they are doing! A business owner can more easily judge the competency of a service provider if they have a clear understanding of what SEO really is, what the goals are, and what separates Good SEO from Bad, or Merely Adequate SEO.

SEO is nothing more than this:

A set of strategies to help search engines more accurately identify the content and purpose of your site, so that they can accurately index the site.

Notice the total absence of the words, “manipulate”, “trick”, “make”, or other words that would imply that you are expecting anything other than accuracy. When accuracy is achieved, then traffic comes to your site that consists of people who WANT what you have.

The prime goal is accuracy. If you focus on that, then you won’t fall into temporary traps for manipulating search engines.

Good SEO services involve some tactics and philosophies that are recognizable. Any business owner can learn to recognize these concepts:

1. Search Engine Optimization is about PEOPLE first. When done right, it works BECAUSE it is done first for people. It is about how people think, what they want to know, and particularly, what YOUR target market wants to know. Whenever search engines are placed over people in importance, the quality and effectiveness declines.
2. Content is the most important factor in good SEO. Keyword usage through a site happens naturally with good content, and never sounds like the keyword use was anything other than natural. Good content includes interesting writing, good product descriptions, and meaningful headings. Good content NEVER contains meaningless repetitions or keyword lists.
3. Tags are only a small part of the SEO picture. Some people will go through a site and put in title, meta, and alt tags, and think the site is done. Those things are NOT the most important things, though they should be done. Good SEO also includes good site structure, intelligent link and filenames, topically focused pages, well organized information, and clean coding.
4. There is a difference between having tags in place, and having GOOD tags in place. Careful crafting of human appealing titles and descriptions, with intelligent keyword usage is a far different thing than what many SEO “experts” install into a site, and the results that are gained will show the difference. Many site owners will put in title and metatags themselves, and miss the goal of optimizing them also, because they fail to fully understand the real purpose of the tags.
5. Good SEO will simultaneously meet 99% of the requirements for ADA Accessiblity in a small website. Two birds with one stone!
6. Good SEO will be prioritized according to the budget, site needs, and business needs. Good content is always the first priority. Good title tags are usually the second. In an image intensive site, good alt-tags may be very important. Other items are prioritized by what the current status is, and what the business goals are.
7. SEO Price Breakpoints are different for small businesses than they are for large ones. Things that are recommended for larger corporations may not be practical for a small business, and especially for microbusinesses and startups. Focus for this business group requires prioritizing for maximum results from minimum expenditure, by a professional who knows what that is for a very small business.
8. Strategies used for very small businesses may be different from strategies used for very large ones, especially if the business in question is competing in a high-competition niche. When small businesses compete with large businesses, they are up against someone who can always outgun them with frontdoor tactics. With SEO, there are a series of solid, perfectly legit “backdoor” tactics which allow a small business with a small budget to slowly and consistently gain an advantage and a market share, by going after the bits that nobody else is squabbling over. Individually those bits aren’t much, but collectively they add up to a very nice market share when you go after the lot of them. There are ways to do this which are highly cost effective (not all ways of doing it are, but the good ones for microbusiness get a lot of bang for the buck).

Good quality SEO prioritizes, and accomplishes more than just a single goal. It involves the entire site through all layers, and relies more on common sense and consistency than it does on any kind of tricks or secrets. It focuses on using LANGUAGE, not just keywords, in ways that put people at the fore of everything that is done.

Our third article will discuss what to look out for when hiring a professional to help you with SEO.