SEO is to a Website, What Fuel is to a Car

I know what you’re thinking. Why on earth would I compare fuel & cars to SEO & websites? But if you think about it, it makes sense and if you need a fun analogy on a gray day like today, it’s a fun way to explain SEO.

Many clients I’ve worked with know what SEO is and know it’s important. But don’t fully understand WHY it’s important. They know it has something to do with search engines being able to find their content , but still find it hard to justify spending the money on a professionally implemented SEO strategy.

There are definitely different stages of implementing SEO and different scenarios you can run into with websites. The two situations below cover what you may run into with a site that’s been around for a long time and the SEO challenges it may be facing, or a brand new site just launched that needs a jump-start in the right direction.

Scenario #1 – Your Audi R8 needs some legal performance enhancing “tweeks”.

Perhaps your client has an awesome, attractive website that’s been live for quite some time and can’t figure out why the site isn’t performing organically as well as it should be.

In this case your website could probably use some sprucing up “under the hood”. Adding lighter wheels, a better suspension or fuel injectors will legally make your car faster. Or for websites, removing unnecessary code and adding some technical aspects to speed things up and get the spiders crawling your site more frequently. Making some technical changes such as:

Including Java Script coding and CSS in external include files. This helps the search engine spiders find the important content in the source code with greater ease.

Title tags and meta data should be right at the top of the source code – after the and before the content. These tags should be unique on every page of the site.

Ensuring there is only one home page of the site available to the spiders, removing any links to /index/ and having the site go directly to the root URL.

Making sure all links on site are text based so search engines can crawl quickly from page to page.

These are just some of the many, many things you can do to your Audi R8 under the hood to make your content zoom around the internet faster.

Scenario #2 – You just purchased a brand new Audi R8, now add some gas to jump start it.

You’ve just had a website built and need a “jump-start” to get it ranking where it should be in Google. Adding the right keywords to the right places on your site, adding some insurance and driving carefully will give it the juice to help it start ranking along.

Insurance: Make sure Google can find your pages by adding a sitemap.xml

Drive carefully & avoid pot-holes by adding Alt Tags as search-bots can’t decipher what images are, you need to give them directions around anything they may bump into.

The most important aspect of on-page SEO would be optimized content. At least 400 words of optimized content on the home page, 250 – 300 words of optimized content on inner destination pages. This is the fuel that will jump start the indexing of your content by the search engines and really speed things up.

Stay Street Legal

There are a lot of gimmicks out there that promise to have your Audi R8 the fastest car on the block in 10 seconds or less. This can be said for black-hat SEO tactics which promise to have your site ranking quickly on the first page of search results.

The fact is, proper SEO implementation takes time and tweaking, and anyone who promises you anything different is probably running a chop shop of sorts. Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering to add non-legal street parts to your car:

Avoid mechanics that promise fast, fly-by-night results with non-legal parts. Yes your site will rank quickly, but only for a short time before being demoted by Google. SEO that times time will have you ranking long term.

Abide by the street laws of Google. Make sure you are up-to-date with their Webmaster Guidelines and terms of service policies. Know what SEO practices are street legal or not.

Stay out of bad neighborhoods and avoid linking schemes, you’ll lose your racing credibility and be laughed because your tires fall off due to poor maintenance.

Avoid building a “sleeper”. Making your car look legal for the cops, and serving another one on the drag-strip is one thing. But the same can’t be done for serving one site for the spiders, and another for the humans. This is called “cloaking” and will end in your site disappearing from the search results altogether. You may not get caught tomorrow, or a month from now, but you WILL get caught.

So there you have it, a fun SEO analogy for a gray day. Sign up for the 6S newsletter to stay up-to-date on 6S events & news at www.6smarketing.com.

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