CEO Corner - Can you just SEO my website? Part 3

As a CEO or business owner, you have heard the term, SEO and you have an idea what that means.  But I will wager that my definition is not the same as yours.   My definition of true SEO is to have a website made up of 5 properly planned and designed components.

The third component of SEO is the content of the page; this includes the text and pictures.  As a business owner or CEO of a company have you looked at every page on your website?  I want you to think about the following when you do.  Is each page setup to address a specific topic and does it have a goal or call to action?  A lot of times some calls to action are in the design of the site or in a specific location on every page, but sometimes you need to put them in the content, whether it is text or images.

Before I architect a website or application I perform a few tasks that includes a survey and research. I determine some keywords that may be used for a particular website.  These could be product names, business classifications, industry names, services and much more.  I then research these to see which are the most popular and rank them. I also look for additional keywords that may be derivatives that have not been considered.   Enough text needs to be written on each and every keyword.  Pictures and graphics are very desirable to be obtained for each keyword to give a visual representation of that word or phrase.   You will probably find that you are using key phrases more than individual words, this is because most people search using them.  Your pages will have instances of the root word along with the phrases. 

For example, you might have a website that sells golf clubs.  You could end up with textual content that uses golf as the main keyword, golf clubs would be another and then subsets could include used golf clubs, new golf clubs, used 'manufacturer name' golf clubs and so on.   You can see where you can expand your website from a few pages to many more.  And you can do this fairly easily.  You don't want to put the same content on each page but it has to be devoted to a main keyword or phrase.  Without getting too deep in the weeds, a sub keyword page, i.e. used golf clubs would have a navigation (read part 2) link in the content to the 'golf clubs' page and vice versa.   This provides a lot of natural-like links throughout your whole website.   Have you ever looked a Wikipedia page? There are places for related topics and much more.  There are many ways to get your user to see that there is more content, make it easy for them to know that it is available.  It could also be argued that this method of constructing your text is for the search engines more than the user, but they and the users are your audience.  Do not forsake one for the other.

While the text of your website, its organization, quality and quantity is required to gain search engine traction, pictures add spice to the presentation.  We live in a visual society; users won't read all of your content.  But if you don't have pictures or compelling visuals, you probably won't keep their attention long, make them feel comfortable and thus stimulate them to act on your call to action.

So is your content really optimized?  And what of my other four components of building the optimized foundation for your web site?