What is SEO and why should I care?

There's a good chance you've heard of SEO, but in case you haven't, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The term refers to steps you can take on your website to help it rank higher in search results.

Google search

When you search for something on Google, the results are returned as a list of web pages (more on the AI results later). This means that Google must decide which pages are most relevant to the person's query. For example, a query for "gray fluffy house cats" will likely return an entire website dedicated to them as the first result, but the second may only be a site about all colors of fluffy house cats.

How does Google know this and decide how to rank them? The exact method is Google's own secret recipe, often referred to as the "page rank algorithm", but Google provides some basic data about what it considers important.

Key factors

Some of the features about a website that can influence how relative a web page is to a user's query include:

In a nutshell, Google will return links to websites that are more favorable in these areas, among others.

Improving your search cred

Some of these factors we can't control, such as how long the site has been in existence. But there are other things we can optimize to make sure we're putting our best foot forward. We can make sure our site is secured with SSL, structure our pages with a clear hierarchy, and publish new content regularly.

For matching text, we can make sure our key words appear in places like the site's name, headings, and meta descriptions. We also want to sprinkle in related keywords in paragraph blocks. Examples might include "Brushing long haired gray cats" or "Things to know about adopting long haired house cats".

We can also publish regularly so that Google sees we're actively maintaining the site and our content isn't outdated. There are also more subtle things like adding "alt text" to images, which is a text string that gets displayed when an image isn't available or may be read aloud for visually impaired visitors.

What NOT to do

In the early days of SEO, people would try to just add keywords to their pages to get them to appear to have more content. Maybe this was in very small type at the bottom of the page, in non-relevant image names, etc. This is known as keyword stuffing and Google figured out pretty quickly that these sites should either be ignored completely or put further down the list because people were gaming the system.

Another tactic still around today, is the use of "link farms" which are just bogus skeleton websites that have links to your website. These were relatively easy to create, but eventually Google started measuring the quality of the backlinks. So now a backlink from a major new site like the New York Times (nytimes.com) is way more valuable than fakewebsite.org.

Produce good content

If you've followed all the best practices, the next best thing you can do is to produce interesting content for your website that people will find of value. Share your content on social media or other websites, and if what you post is entertaining or useful, people will naturally share it, generating backlinks.

In the end, ranking high on Google is playing the long game but is almost always worthwhile. The only other way to get to the top is to pay Google in the form of sponsored results. If you get to the top for your particular niche you can save yourself a tremendous amount of money since you won't have to advertise AND people will take you more seriously.

Getting people to come to your website is called "inbound marketing" or "pull marketing". More on that later, but for now let's make sure your site has the basics of SEO down.

SEO is a product of good design

When I build websites, they all have the basics of SEO built into them with security, structured content, proper metadata, and content that fits your niche. We'll make sure to get all the major SEO elements into place so you can launch your new site knowing you'll be covered.