BREAKING:
Holistic SEO, More than Keywords and Link Building
If you do any reading on Search
Engine Optimization, you’re sure to encounter terms such as link building,
keyword optimization. If you venture even further down the rabbit hole
you’ll see people going even further in their second-guessing of the search
engines, employing terms such as “search engine algorithms” and other complex
mathematical theories.
Yet, many people in their quest to build the most search engine friendly
website possible, neglect many of the less-talked-about factors which
contribute to your website’s online success. The way your website looks and
feels, the quality of the writing on your website, the type of customer service
you offer: these all have just as much, if not more of an effect on your
website’s Page Rank as good keywords do.
SEO, much more than link building. Business knowledge, design & ergonomic skills…emetics
One key area that many of us neglect is the field of web design and website
ergonomics. The former mainly concerns the way your website looks and feels,
its colour scheme and layout. The latter is all about what happens when your
website meets the human body. How easy is it for a customer to find exactly
what they want on your website? How much strain does this put on their eyes,
their hands and their attention spans? It’s amazing how many people plough
hundreds of dollars into SEO’ing their website without even considering how
easy it is for a customer to navigate to that vital “buy” button.
Amongst the many things that you can optimise in order to improve your
website’s ergonomics are: page and graphics loading times, site layout and
mapping, and colour scheme. If the colour scheme is too bright, users will find
it hard to look at your website and will frequently click away. Similarly, if
every single page on your website takes longer than 10 seconds to load on an
average connection in the most popular browsers, you’ve probably just lost a
customer. Once the page is loaded, the cardinal rule of website ergonomics is
that a customer should be able to navigate to any page on the website within
three clicks – anything more than that and attention spans are likely to
wander.
The Purple Cow…
Another thing to think about when promoting your website is mimetic: the
science of the way that ideas spread. Sometimes you can optimise as much as you
want, but one catchy and unique idea will often multiply a website’s popularity
much quicker and more time-efficiently. Seth Godin was perhaps the first to
apply these ideas to internet marketing in his book “Purple Cow”: like a purple
cow, a good viral video or article may just attract attention to your site and
generate “buzz” with little more input from you.
Finally, one
highly traditional but equally effective way to improve your website’s sales is
to provide good customer service. Most businesses will do the majority of their
custom with repeat customers, who are always far easier to sell to. With SEO
experts beginning to wake up the the fact that user generated reviews of
websites and businesses have a measurable effect upon search engine ranking,
particularly in terms of local searches, it may be time to take a step back and
look at the way your business performs as a whole. Is it doing a job, and
satisfying its customers every time?
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