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08.16.10 Ensuring Your Site Is Easily Understood By Search Engines & Users  By Stephen PittsThere is a lot of things that fly around about SEO but all of them can be easily summed up in three specific optimization areas: 1. Technical and Server Side 2. Content Development 3. Promotion and Link Development Within each of these three areas are opportunities and limitations, but to have a great site, you will need to address concerns in each of these areas to ensure your website is performing well and it is easily understood by both search engines and users. One of the most important things about performing well in any competitive space (no matter if it's ones and zeros, the track or on an athletic field) is knowing how each part of your team is performing and what you can expect to happen given any circumstance. I am known for giving analogies but the stool relationship is more valid than others that come to mind, namely because if you fail to consider the one or more of these three competency areas you don't have a really great product (if you are lacking all three, forgive the pun, you might not have a leg to stand on). Back to the understanding of your team, you may be counting on one or more of these items from your website and not knowing that you are being outclassed by your competitors and rightfully so not showing up in the top positions in the search results. There are a number of tools that can help you assess the level or lack of performance in each of these areas and I leverage a number of them myself to find out what the server response codes are, how much content is actually present on a particular page or the anchor text of the links pointed to my website, but ideally these are tactical concerns and you may be focused on one tree while the rest of the forest might not be doing so hot either. Having a balanced or holistic approach is one of the most important ways to effectively compete and continually grow. All too often, SEOs look at a particular area of opportunity, whether if be a new technical piece (example: canonical tagging) but miss the real opportunity (example: correcting your URL structure to only publish one URL per unique page). The core best practices that have remained relatively consistent during my tenure in online optimization (some ten years) are still the best practices today. Yes, there are new aspects that have cropped up (XML sitemaps, social networking, blogging, microformats, etc.) but these are all just flavors of the same core best practices (page identification, link development, content publication, content type identification). In my last post (yes, it was a long, long time ago), I identified a tactical approach to correcting specific concerns, but before you can really delve into the details, it is important to get the full picture of your site. Review your technical, content and link development efforts, if you feel you are over your head, look for someone you can trust whether it be a interactive or SEO agency, a friend, colleague or even a community. Your website is more than just a group of electronic pages that can be read online, it is pretty close to a person needing direction and attention to grow. I have always said SEO is not a destination but a journey, if you agree, I have a question for you, where was your last stop? Comments
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