Focusing Knowledge

This article discusses the practical aspects of running a successful website, and the ongoing tasks associated with maintaining a good competitive position in the search engines over time.

In our last article, Effective Web Marketing: Common Sense SEO Developing an Effective Keyword Strategy, we discussed the methodology of coming up with a successful keyword strategy.  This article discussed how to keep those successes.  At the outset, you should understand that building a site that successfully attracts search engines yields neither immediate nor persistent results.  It takes time to test, analyze, optimize, and adjust web pages for the desired results.  This is only partly because search engines index your pages at infrequent and unpredictable intervals, but also because their methods for evaluating the pages are constantly evolving and growing more sophisticated over time.

In addition, the thousands of competitors (and non-competitors) using similar keywords are goring in number and sophistication.  At some point you may be competing for position with a new popular movie which has similar keywords to the ones you have used to describe your product.  And all of those competing sites want to accomplish the same thing you do: achieve high page 1 ranking for their site.

I like to tell clients to think of their website as analogous to a store front.  If a store is in a good neighborhood with lots of foot traffic (well optimized in the SEO sense), it will generate lots of interest.  But if the client  does little to promote the site or chooses a failing strategy, few people will know it’s there, or be interested even if they do come across it.  If a store with good traffic goes on the cheap and dresses the window in brown paper, and wire mannequins, few will stop to look.  And if the owner kept the window looking the same year after year, especially when other stores were changing their windows to reflect the new styles and seasons, it will attract little interest because it appears that the owner doesn’t care.  Similarly, websites need to change their content and appearance to attract new customers, and to refresh interest from the search engines.

Like Eddie Murphy’s character, Axel Foley, in Beverly Hills Cop where he’s a “biness man always poppin’ and movin””, that’s what a successful website has to do too.  Search engines like sites with new and fresh content, and so do readers.  And so do website owners, because an up-to-date site ensures that the site will be able to compete effectively.  Visualize your website as a salesman who sells your product or services.  You should expect to spend about as much on your website which you expect to draw in new customers, as you would pay a good salesman!

In the beginning of the web era, there was a school of thought that would stoke the copy with keywords, and even put invisible keywords to fool the robots, but be unavailable to the human reader.  The search engines have long since gotten wise to such scams, and now penalize sites who try such stunts.  The strategy today is to write for the readers (with a nod to scoring moderately for keyword density) and produce interesting, informative fresh copy that is of value to the user.  In the process, there’s plenty of time and space to promote your product or service.  But it’s not too different from selling in the real world:  if you try to scam the customer, he’ll eventually figure out the game and won’t do business with you anymore.

However, if you use the medium to build an honest, helpful and informative conversation with the customer, the market as a whole will be healthier, and you will get your fair share of business because you are providing extra value for the customer.