Posts Tagged ‘Architecture’

All right, I’ll admit, the title is somewhat over dramatic. But, when you don’t have much to offer, hype it up anyway! Kinda like the movies!

This post started from talking about How NOT To Do An Interview: The Basics. What was originally going to be an intro paragraph turned into a full post. When this happens, I just do what I often do… take one idea and make multiple posts out of it. Love it!

What follows are 15 questions I felt were important for a business audience to know about SEO. And, now that I know what I meant when I wrote them (see introduction), I can provide the answers I intended. Here are questions 1-5:

Click here to keep learning

The thought that you should SEO your site before you even develop it seems counter-intuitive, and in many ways, it is. But, not entirely. I’ve been an SEO for over 12 years, and I still can’t get past the fact that optimization continues to be the “after thought,” only coming into play long after the site has been up and running for months or even years.

This mindset needs to change.

Click here to keep learning

The optimal time to start consulting with the SEO on a new website is at the very beginning. And, I mean the VERY beginning… when the website is just a sparkle in it’s dreamer’s eye.

I was recently consulting with a client who brought us on at the very beginning of a new project. It worked beautifully, as we got to work with their wire-frame layouts and help guide them through the important design and architecture aspects before they paid a single cent to a programmer.

Had they brought us in later, much of our advice would have either been discarded because they were beyond the point of no return, or they would have shelled out more money to have the developers re-program the entire site to accommodate good usability and search friendly architecture. Getting us involved when they did not only saved them thousands of dollars, but allowed them to build a strong, search-engine-friendly site from the ground up.

Click here to keep learning

A little over a year ago I wrote an article about how sometimes you have to break a website in order to fix it. This isn’t always the case in SEO but there are those situations where a site is so bad that you pretty much need to burn it to the ground before you can build it right.

The other day I reviewed a site that confirmed this premise. It wasn’t a bad looking site on the surface but once you looked into the architecture a bit you found problems compiling on top of problems. Nothing short of demolishing the entire site and building it from the ground up would allow it to gain any traction in the search engines.

Click here to keep learning

Marketing a website isn’t particularly difficult. It’s usually just a matter of knowing what to do, how to do it, and having the skills and time to get it done. With that said, marketing a website isn’t particularly easy either. There are so many factors and variables in play that at any given time that the job can be quite overwhelming. Obviously I can’t address the issue of whether or not you have the skills or time, but I can help you out with the “what to do” piece of the puzzle.

I’ve always been a lover of checklists, especially when it comes to getting things done. Especially when it comes to remembering what things need to be done! So over the last several years I’ve been putting together checklists for all kinds of things pertaining to website marketing.

Below is my master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn’t cover any “how tos,” which are an essential ingredient to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.

Click here to keep learning

While back I wrote an article about how having a search engine friendly website does not make it search engine optimized. The article discussed how many web developers promise to “search engine optimize” the websites they develop. While I don’t mean to discount the value of a good web developer (I rely on them heavily) many developers really know no more about SEO than than they do about pluming. Sure, they can plunge a blocked toilet, or write some decent titles and meta descriptions, but there is so much more to SEO (and plumbing) than that.

A good web developer will undoubtedly build a very search engine friendly website. But it takes someone steeped in SEO to truly optimize it. Very few web developers study search engine marketing they way an SEO dedicates their time to learning, studying and practicing the art of on- and off-page optimization.

One of the comments I received from that article really struck home to me and did a great job of fleshing out what I have always believed about SEO:

Click here to keep learning