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We all know how hard it is to get through some clients’ heads
the importance of a well done SEO, specially when they have a
web designer on the other side trying to sell the coolest
website on earth. Of course I have nothing against cool, when
it’s done SEO friendly, the problem is finding web designers
that know what that means! Dealing straight with the costumers,
I have felt that using some very straightforward analogies and
patiently teaching the client in the simplest way possible, not
only brings them closer to you, but makes them realize the real
importance of SEO. In many instances, it the information we give
them won’t be the most technically accurate, but it will be the
easiest way for them to understand.
This is what I call the SEO 101 approach:
Having a website which is not seen is as good as having a
beautiful brochure locked in a drawer. It may sound kind of
obvious, but the main reason to have a web presence is so it is
seen! A website can serve as a virtual brochure, where you tell
your client, “Oh, by the way, visit our site…”, or it can be a
virtual salesman, bringing in new business, increasing revenue,
becoming a real division of the company. As important as the
beauty and “coolness” of the site can seem, the number one
consideration to have is “How are people going to find my
site?”. The answer is simple: 80% of all web traffic comes from
search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Lycos, etc.). However, this
is where it gets complicated: the web has an estimated 4.28
billion websites (according to Google director for search
quality, Peter Norvig), and all of them want to be seen, hence
the search engine’s so called spiders, mechanisms that “crawl”
through the websites reading and “ranking” them. The spiders’
task is to evaluate the site through a series of standards, and
the sites that meet the highest number of these criterions will
be placed higher on the search engine results. Would you start
building a house by the roof? Or even worst, would you consider
just building a house with no project whatsoever, just a picture
of what it would look like? Of course not! But that is exactly
what most designers are doing. They build beautiful sites, which
at the end are totally dysfunctional, navigation is terrible
and, worst of all, NOT spider-friendly at all. It’s like having
a house which is gorgeous on the outside, but when you go
inside, there are no halls connecting the rooms, some halls take
to nowhere, the toilet is in the kitchen, the shower in the
living room, bedrooms have no doors, and the furniture is made
out of papier-mâché. Yes, this is exactly how some websites look
to us. The big secret in SEO is having a good architectural
project, which will give you a plan of how the structure of the
website will be like, and then a nicely done layout can be
fitted beautifully on it. That will help, not only the spiders
to crawl the site, but certainly will make it more pleasurable
for your prospect clients to navigate through the site
maximizing the experience. Giving the client a more enjoyable
experience means he/she will navigate for a longer time in your
website, getting to know more about your product, building more
confidence with your company, thus increasing the potential of
sale.
About Author :
Julio Ferreira is the CEO of Metanoia Marketing Group, with
offices in Dallas, Sao Paulo (Brazil), and now oppening in San
Diego. 817.944.1020
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