SEO Tip O’ the Mornin’: Stickiness Alone Doesn't Cut It
A business website can have the most advanced web application and engaging web design out there, but still not generate many new clients. Stickiness refers to the ability of a website to hold people’s interest once they get to the website, but if nobody ever finds a website, stickiness does not matter at all. SEO (search engine optimization) is the necessary counterpart to effective web design and stickiness. SEO refers the process of content writing and web design that win a web site higher search ranking. The way to make sure that a website gets the traffic it deserves is through SEO, and it can be simplified so that anyone can understand what SEO means.
The exact algorithm that Google uses to determine the ranking of web pages found by keyword searches is unknown. Fortunately, there is a vast body of empirical SEO knowledge out there about how to achieve a higher ranking. It is true that the amount of traffic your website receives boosts its ranking, and short of requiring all employees to visit the site a proscribed number of times, there is no direct way that we can influence this factor. In fact, the end result is to lure more people to the website, and we have to start at the beginning, and not the end. There are several ways that a business can manipulate how highly its website ranks on organic Google searches. Two ways that anyone can affect where their page ranks in an organic search are content writing and keyword usage.
In terms of SEO content is important not only for the information it conveys to visitors, but for the effect it can have on search engine result ranking. Larger pages with more content tend to have a slightly higher page ranking. So, whatever your business does, it can’t hurt to write a lot about it on your website.
What is most important for SEO is keyword density, which refers to the frequency of the most relevant keywords found within the content of a website. If a business sells tropical fish food, SEO requires that those three words be mentioned frequently. We have stated that larger websites rank more highly, but if the new content you produce for your site does not contain enough of your keywords, you could actually hurt your ranking. If your business sells tropical fish and you write 3,000 words about varieties of tropical fish but only use the words tropical fish three times, your keyword density will only be at one percent. A 1,000 word article that mentions tropical fish three times will have a density for these keywords of three percent. A lower percentage of relevant keywords will hurt the ranking of a website in a Google search for those keywords. So, it is important to include the necessary keywords in whatever content you write for your website.
Web design can be important too, because images go unseen by search engine computers, so text is better for SEO. If your tropical fish business is called ‘tropical fish store,’ making your image logo into a text logo can really help for SEO, because the title of a page and the main logo carry more weight than other parts of the site. Rule number one of SEO is to pay attention to seemingly insignificant wording, such as the page title, all the way at the top of a web page, which so many people ignore. Title may be ignored by visitors to the website, but not by the computer that they use to search for that site. So, if you start by overlooking nothing, using your relevant keywords, and writing more content for your website, you’ll be well on your way to increasing your site’s ranking in a Google search.
Theses are the basics, but what is important to remember is that SEO counts, even though it may seem insignificant. Many of our clients at Patellignce are amazed to see their pages coming up at the top of the first page of a Google search after we have carried out SEO for their websites. As Peter Kent put it, in “Search Engine Optimization for Dummies,” ((Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008), ISBN 978-0-470-26270-2), the website consummates the marriage, but SEO is the matchmaker that sets up the first date.
