Tomorrow at DevCom Brussels, I will be doing some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysis live, in the framework of the 7 minute one to one demos. For this, I have prepared a checklist with some basic points to take home by the clients / visitors. I’m sure I will not have enough time to cover all of them, but they will at least have a clue of where to start looking and about some of the things SEO professionals can help get right.
Some marketing and communication professionals wrongly despise SEO, considering it just a bunch of technical tricks used to divert Internet users towards sites not worthy of their attention. The truth is that they should look at it from the perspective of their clients: good SEO helps users find the content they are looking for. SEO is not some arkane cult or ritual. Most marketing and communication professionals know some of its basics thanks to their education in journalism, and most of the rest are very easy to imply using a little reasoning and common sense or even better: reading. The key of SEO and of any communication effort is relevance. As search engines are getting better to analyze and categorize the millions of pages we are publishing, user signals are gaining importance, and guess what: it is the users themselves that give them. So concentrate on your users and see the world through their eyes. If what you are offering is not clearly relevant to what they are looking for, you will either never get them to visit your page, either never convert their actions into something fruitful for your organization. Danny Sullivan has recently published a great article about why Bill Gates needs better SEO in his blog. This post is a great and educative example of why and how to get the basics right. You can see that It is not complicated to get the basics right.
