I recently had someone ask me what optimization meant when I was talking about SEO and saying that a website is optimized has better chances of being crawled. I thought about it and it made perfect sense… surely not everyone understands what I do, or rather what search engine optimization was, so I took a moment to explain to her.
What is Optimization?
First, you have to look at what optimization is. Optimization is making something more functional. So, in this case, optimizing a website would be to make it more functional. Just that alone would be two-fold, in that it brings up a second question – functional for whom?
If you think about it, you have your website established for the ease to the consumer by making your products and services available online
24/7, or in many cases. It provides a place to go to get more information when the store, for example, is closed or a place to go when researching more information about a company. So, optimizing your website would be to make it functional for the consumer. You want to be sure your website is user friendly, that the consumers find what they need with ease – this is often called website usability or readability. If they, the consumer, can’t find what they are looking for, they will leave and find it on a site that is easier to navigate. So, I’ll leave that thought with this – be sure your website is clean, easy to read, easy to navigate and provides the answers to the questions the consumers may have about your products or services.
Next onto Search Engine Optimization
Now that we get a little more about what optimizing a website is about – for the consumers, what about search engine optimization? Just like you’d expect, search engine optimization is about making a website functional and user friendly for the search engines. SEO’s main things to consider, but not limited to, are keyword rich content, links and meta tags such as title tag, meta description tag and less important meta keywords to name just a few. Doing these things as well as ensuring your website is fully functional by not having broken links, having a sitemap and having nofollow on your robots.txt file where the robots don’t need to crawl, for example will aid the search engine spiders in crawling the important parts of your website. This indexing of your website will then be cached with the search engines for when a user searches a keyword phrase, in hopes that your website will be returned in those results for the user.
So why do we need SEO?
Remember those consumers we were talking about earlier? They can’t be searching your website for your products or services if they don’t find your website. So, you need to optimize your website for the search engines to help the consumers find your website as well as optimize your website for the consumer ease to keep them there in hopes of buying your products or services.
Keep in mind that SEO takes time to do and should be done on a monthly basis to keep the search engine spiders coming back to your website. If you would like further information on search engine optimization, please check out some of my other blogs on search engine optimization. If you are interested in outsourcing the SEO so you can focus on building your business or would like a 1on1 so you can learn how to Do It Yourself, let me know as I offer monthly maintenance as well as educational consulting services. Contact me today with any questions.
~Kristen
It’s a wakeup call when someone doesn’t know the meaning of something we work at every day, isn’t it. I thought this article gave a very good description.
I know right.. however, often times we are in networking groups and it’s hard to explain all of what we do anyhow! Thanks Beth!
You are SO preaching to the choir here, girlfriend. People who write website copy for themselves as simply stroking their own…egos. It is NOT about showing off your intelligence, your education, your products or your services. It’s about connecting with your prospects in a way that is meaningful to them. If your website is not drawing the traffic you want, look in the mirror for the reason why. Then hire Kristen to help!
Ohhhh, thank you Jackie! You got that right… it’s about informing the consumer, hopefully in the same way to work with the search engines! Thanks for the Shout out!
You make a complicated topic make sense. Myfriend and I have been reading many of your articles that explain everything. I have a webmaster handling mine and I like to know what has to happen.
Thanks so much Rosyln, glad that I have made it more understandable as you are right… it can be very complicated! I agree, good to know the workings of what you are paying people to do.
Who asked you that question then? 😉
Thanks for putting it into a blog
Thank YOU Miss Sonya! I appreciate you and I figured if one person had the question, others would too. My industry is often misunderstood… if so, we aren’t doing our job to educate!
Great info and it’s all important. If people can’t find you, he great information you have to share and the great products or services mean nothing.
That’s right Mike. Why spend hours and dollars on this great website if it can’t be found.
Thanks so much for this article. It’s difficult to be a jack of all trades. So glad to have friends that are experts in different areas!
It is difficult that’s why we need to remind ourselves that we don’t have to and to outsource where we can. Glad to be a friend and to help. Thanks Stacey!
Thanks for the in depth information. It is clearer now and you are right this needs to be done often to make sure those spiders are coming back. Thanks.
You are welcome Yakini, glad to help.
Hi Kristen,
Do you think inbound links are as important as they used to be? Or has social media interaction taken over?
Thanks!
Absolutely Dan, the catch is now that you don’t want to be buying them like back in the day. I post to social bookmarking sites and then of course social media. I write a new blog a week but post to social media a blog a day. That should give you an idea of what I am trying to do. Plus, posting to bookmark sites as well like StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc.