SEO-Baking In Website Success

Poke around the search engine optimization (SEO) community enough, and you’ll come across the phrase “baking it into a website” eventually. It’s a popular metaphor in our corner of the web-design market. Many of us talk about SEO as if it’s the chocolate chips in cookie batter; you can’t just jam them in after the cookie after it comes out of the oven, they have to be mixed in with all the other elements from the beginning. But what does “baking” mean to someone looking to build a website, and why should they take SEO into consideration at the start?

An SEO specialist focuses on increasing a customer’s visibility on the web. This involves working with a company’s marketing team to determine their business goals, target audience and priorities. As a general rule, some pages will be deemed more important than others, and the specialist needs to know where to focus their efforts. Optimizers who work with teams will take this information in mind, then brainstorm with copywriters to identify appropriate keywords, industry lingo and common search terms.

While the writer drafts content with the desired keyword density, the SEO specialist uses programs like WordTracker and WordStream to research the most sought-after keywords.  A strong SEO strategy can help minimize the cost of PPC (if a site has been built to attract the attention of search engines, it doesn’t necessarily need to rely on PPC ads), but the data from PPC campaigns helps to inform the written content of the site itself.  This also gives a general idea of which phrases are overused, suggesting the best use of creative synonyms.

With the content ready, an SEO specialist then consults with the designer, feeding them keywords to include in each page’s title tags. These tags flag down search engines, summarizing the page’s content. Many do-it-yourself-ers are completely unaware of the existence of page tags, never mind their importance.

Lastly, a specialist turns to weaving links into the website’s infrastructure. Search engines follow more than just keywords, they also click through the links connecting one site to another, mapping out the site in a process known as “spidering”. Specialists submit requests to other relevant sites for link-swaps, link to valuable industry resources and verify each site address. The more on-topic the link, the more validated the site on the other end, the better our clients are ranked.

Any one of these tasks would be incredibly time-consuming and messy to go back and add to a site after construction. Imagine having to re-tag every single page, instead of doing so as they’re built.  Imagine rewriting all the copy to incorporate keywords. And just imagine the tedium of double-checking every link on a regular basis.  I imagine it’d be just as tedious to poke chocolate chips into a cookie one by one.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 8:11 am and is filed under Internet marketing, Marketing Tips, Search Engine Optimization, Website design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.