Why use SEO?
June 12th, 2007 by Joost SchrierThere are still a lot of misconceptions about Search Engine Optimization. Some of the people we talk to (potential clients or other design agencies) think that it’s as simple as submitting your website to the search engines and you will be found for the keyword “hotels”. Others think that it’s a dark art practiced with herbs, pentagrams and strange incantations when the moon is full. Some of us do drink herb tea in the evenings occasionally, but they stick to talking instead of chanting.
It is only natural that people have these misconceptions. Ask me to tell you everything I know about cars and I will also be done in 5 minutes and 2 minutes of those will be gibberish. That doesn’t mean I’m an idiot, it just means that I know more about SEO than I do about cars.
Search Engine Optimization is still a relatively young discipline (especially here on Curacao), it can be pretty complex and is certainly very dynamic. This is the perfect breeding ground for misconceptions. The more people learn about SEO and/or understand the reason why you should use it, the easier our work becomes.
The main things you need to know to understand why your website should be created and maintained with SEO in mind are the why and the how of SEO. The main reason of SEO is of course to get more traffic to your website by making sure your website can actually be found. There are more reasons though:
- Trust: when somebody has heard of your company and your product and are interested, they will try to find yoor company. A lot of people use a search engine to find websites and if they can’t find your website they will trust you less. NB: it actually happens that companies can not be found on the exact words in their URL due to bad SEO.
- Brand recognition: if people are looking for a specific product you sell, let’s say you sell blue widgets, and people are looking for this product they need to be able to find you. This does not only increase the traffic to your website, but it will also increase brand recognition. People will associate your company with blue widgets if you come up first in the search results.
- Competitive edge: because your company is higher in the search engine results page than your competitor’s people will almost automatically think that your company is better. Maybe it just means that you have a better website, but people looking at those results pages don’t know this beforehand.
So, search engine optimization does not only help you with getting visitors to your website (thus increasing your chances to sell your products and services) it also helps in shining a favorable light on your company. The really cool thing in this is that if you continue to rank well for your important search terms this light will gradually start to shine brighter.
A while ago there was a ‘discussion’ in a forum at Cre8asite. The person (Sam) that started the thread needed to create a presentation for his superiors in which he should explain how SEO could benefit his company and its clients. He asked for advice on the forum.
Sam got some really great advice (the thread is well worth a read), but then he divulged that he was not allowed to change anything on the website that could be seen. He was allowed to change meta-tags and he was allowed to engage in linkbuilding, but that was it.
You can imagine the reactions of the other people on the forum when Sam told this. Your meta-tags should be in order and link building is definitely important, but you can’t have effective SEO without taking into account the bigger picture. Your website needs to be an integrated whole geared towards the visitor.
If you want to have a website with effective search engine optimization you need to give the people doing it freedom to be able to do it. This could mean that your entire website needs to be rebuilt and/or your texts need to be rewritten. Half measures usually mean that you will need to redo it again soon.
