SEO made simple

Whenever we talk to clients and prospects the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) always comes up. This is great because it means that people are thinking about SEO and it’s not an after thought anymore. The reality though is that it means different things to different people (i.e.: a marketer vs a developer).

Here is an easy break down of how I think about SEO:

1. content: no matter what you promote on your site, shoes, articles, mortages, etc., does you content use the right keywords for its audience? does it have the right industry keywords? If you are selling table, does it explain what is good and interesting about your table and not just the dimensions?
2. how to reach your content: this is where your developers worry about building a page that is accessible to search engines, so the product name is in the title tag, you have appropriate description and keywords in the meta tag, if you are using flash, you provide an alternate content to the search engine, your urls look more humanly readable and don’t contain just random numbers, etc.
3. SEM (Search Engine Marketing): some people just want to buy Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc keywords, so they don’t worry about organic search, all they care is paid search.

There is a whole industry developed around SEO and SEM and many thousands of people involved in it. One thing to remember is that search engines don’t disclose how they rank web pages but there are some best practices, as described in point 2 above, that we all follow. Search engines improve their algorithms over time so it’s important to stay current on what they disclose and on what they don’t.

Finally: don’t hesitate to use Flash or any other rich technology n your web site, no you won’t be penalized if you follow the right steps