Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site
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Every web site owner wants more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. In the midst of an SEO campaign, however, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. So before you change a single title, you might want to shift your focus to answer some important questions.
So what do I mean by losing sight of the forest for the trees anyway? You’ve probably heard that expression since you were a teenager at least. You may even know that it means focusing on the details to the point that you lose sight of the big picture – and with the amount of detail work that goes into a proper SEO project, that’s easy to do.
Changing the questions you ask can shift your focus back to that bigger picture. You need to know what the big picture is before you do any search engine optimization, or you’ll waste a substantial amount of effort. Fortunately, you may only need to change a few words in the questions you already ask. Ease off just a little on the “what” and “how” questions and start asking a few “why” questions. I’ll give examples in the sections that follow.
I expect many of you will look at these questions and think that they should be asked well before a site goes live, very early in the design process. That’s probably true. But it’s also true that web sites evolve over time, rather like people. They change, grow, and adapt to conditions in the marketplace. By the time a web site has been up for a couple of years (or even less), it might be a very different creature from what the site owner originally had in mind.
This kind of change is not a bad thing, per se. We all get a certain amount of satisfaction out of growing and tweaking our sites, and then watching what happens. If we’re not looking clearly at what the site is turning into, however, we can’t see what it needs.
Anthony Kirlew, who writes a blog called Old School SEO and has been in the search engine marketing business since 1999, wrote about these important questions recently. I’m not going to cover his fourth question – “how will they find our web site?” – because we all know the answer to that one: SEO, SEM, and maybe even SMO (social media optimization). Instead, we’ll look at a few “why” questions.
Next: Why Would I Visit Your Web Site? >>
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