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Search Engine Friendly Sites - For the Win!

There's no magic to making a site work. It's simple really. You just need to:

  1. Build a site properly.
  2. Fill it with content that matters to the target audience.
  3. Organize the content and make it readable by search engines.
  4. Market the site.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4.

Nothing to it, right?

Organic search engine optimization (SEO). Built-in from the start.

We work very hard to make our sites fulfill Step #1. If we build our sites using simple, proven techniques and stay away for style-over-substance gimmicks, we can do a lot to help you get good marketing results from your site.

But building the site well is not enough. When we customize your CMS for your project, we’re also working on your Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a way that a page is structured and filled with content to make it accessible and meaningful to search engines. We build the pages and tweak the CMS to give you good structure. But the filling is up to you.

The content that you provide on you site over time is tremendously important to how your site reaches your target audience.  If you are relying on Google and Bing to let people find your site, this content will be more important that almost any single other factor.

Once we build your site, we alert Google and Bing to its arrival. We give them the key page addresses to start indexing (reading and remembering) your site. We make sure that we structure the site so that search engines can move from page to page easily. We code each page so that your headlines and articles act as proper signposts for them to find. There are lots of little extras that, with our experience, we know to add that will help make your site fully readable to all. But we never use cheap tricks to try to fool Google - that can lead to your site being blacklisted.

However… if the content that you provide does not speak directly to your audience, then nothing we’ve done will matter. This is because Google and Bing will read your site easily and store your message until someone searches for a topic that matches yours. If a user comes along and asks for info on a topic that you cover on your site, then the search engine will offer up your pages for them to see – along with all the other pages from other sites that do the same thing.

The order or ranking in which the sites are suggested by search engines matters. This makes the difference between you appearing on the first page of Google or on page 46,387. Your goal should be to provide the best, most on-topic, and useful information possible for your target audience. Do that better than your competition and your site will rise above theirs.

The keys to your site rank include the following:

  • AUDIENCE: How closely did your content match the search terms (both in language and intent)? Does your page use the same words that your desired client uses, or did you just get close? Or did you miss the mark entirely but are relying on Google to guess at your content?
  • AUTHORITY: How much authority does Google think your page has on the subject? If search engines find that your page is often the "go to" page from other sites, then it will assume that you have expertise on the subject and will raise your rankings.
  • TRUST: How well does Google trust your page on the subject?  If your page is well-built and the content has good structure, and your site isn't full of junk info and bad links, then your page rankings will rise. Adding links without context, or off-topic info, or mixing too many topics on one page, adding silly gimmicks, or a host of poor quality content and ill-advised “tricks” to your page, will drop your rankings like a stone.

This a simplification of the SEO process. But we hope it helps you understand the importance of not only building the site properly (that’s our job) but also of using it well (your job). Good quality, fresh content which is on target for your audience, and clearly organized, well-structured articles will carry the day and raise your standings in the eyes of Google and Bing.