As soon as I had a little time this weekend, I downloaded the Foxy SEO toolbar, and used it to scan the keywords of a website I recently launched for my company. It was fascinating to see that the 'title' of the site was indeed still 'home', as opposed to anything that would actually drive qualified visitors to the content. Furthermore, very few relevant keywords showed up on the page at all.
We had several web specialists on the project -- information architecture and user interface specialists, designers and producers. But none were charged with SEO specifically, and while some many have had a general sense that verbiage on the site would be important, it didn't occur to anyone to make sure that the words were integrated in the most critical places.
For me there are a few lessons learned from this experience:
1. SEO won't happen by itself; someone has to be the point person for making sure that it's a part of site design and content development. Designers know design. Content developers know content. Neither group is thinking about SEO unless someone with bigger vision is pushing search optimization as part of the agenda.
2. We thought that more conceptual and less concrete copy frameworks would be better for our audience. That may be true, but because our copy focuses on vague and general rather than concrete and specific, many of the keywords we need for search are present.
3. Meeting your audience's needs isn't possible if the audience can't find you. The best copy can't achieve it's goals if people aren't coming to the site -- and search (particularly Google) is the single greatest driver of traffic.
4. The keywords that drive traffic may not be the most obvious. We did have a few relevant search terms on our page, but they were so broad that we would not be able to compete with the many other sites in our category on the web. We need to get specific.
Looking forward to playing around with the other tools to see where else we may have gone wrong (and hopefully some places we've gone right!).
1 comment:
Thanks Stephanie for sharing your experience. I am a web site architect and developer. I have been utilizing those tools that Prof. Kagan shared with us. I am happy that he did this as not many professionals share their secret weapons they use to analyze the web sites.
I found SEO is a relatively long term investment. It takes anywhere from 3 to 6 months you start witnessing search results.
Back links from reputed high page ranked sites, identifying the right keywords that are achievable and under budget, Html formatting and web site architecture counts towards Search Engine Optimized Sites.
Here are few example that I achieved over 3 to 6 month period.
Google "Web Technologist" will bring my blog http://adeel.info.
Google "Innovative Technology Solutions" will bring one of my online venture efirmSolutions.com
Google "Medical device Company" will bring my employer web site I manage i.e. integralife.com
If anyone needs any more help about using those tools, feel free to contact me.
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