13th Day of Christmas

Robots Are Not Customers

Do you become panic-stricken because your web site is not in the top seven results on Google? Are you trying every SEO “trick” and “tip” you can lay your hands on?

Stop for a moment and imagine customers arriving at your door. Instead of speaking to them, you talked to the cab driver that delivered them to you. You were so busy with the cab driver that you did not even notice that your customers left for your competitor.

The only surefire rocket to the top or right of the list is to pay for it. Before you shell out the cash for a pay-for-click campaign, keep this in mind. People know you paid for the spot. It is no longer a search result, it is an advertisement.

Today’s gift is a dollop of SEO common sense. Be relevant by writing and designing for humans. You want a robot to get what it needs without leaving your customer standing cold at the door.

Search Engine Optimization is extremely important. Just like everything that I am talking about throughout these 24 days of Christmas, this too is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Here again, sadly, there are no short cuts to longevity and consistency. All of your SEO efforts should be directed to attracting your potential customer, not just visitors.

Start by grading your site here. Anything over an 80 percent is good. Again, balance the results with common sense.

Those of you on WordPress already have an advantage since built in is the most important feature you need for organic search—a blog. For those of you who do not have SEO functionality built into your theme, the All In One SEO Pack plugin is excellent.

The two things that robots read are your title meta tags and your meta descriptions for each page. If these are different from the content of your page the robot will dismiss the meta data as spam and not rank your page. Leaving these empty achieves the same result.

The WordPress tags you associate to your blog articles are primarily for people to use to search your site. By consistently using the same tag you are also helping your SEO. Having a large number of tags is not helpful and ultimately a waste of your time. Therefore make your tags relevant to your readers and use them often for SEO.

Please, don’t be a Sam Spam. No, robots do not rank you higher based on the number of times you use a keyword on a page. Stuffing key words into your meta data does not work either because robots don’t read them and neither do humans.

Your goal is to have a site that a robot can rank and is engaging to humans, especially your customers. Your homework for today is to read this excellent guide on SEO.