SEO 101

The Big Secret: It’s All About User Experience

The topic of search engine optimization is all the rage right now and lots of people call VIA Studio because they would like to improve their sites’ ranking in the search engines. Even more people call because they are looking for guidance through the technical jargon, and are confusing Search Engine Optimization with Search Engine Marketing. These are two different things and lots of people get them confused. The truth is, barring some basic technical best practices, improving user interaction with a website is the single best way to improve search engine rankings and that’s what Optimization is all about.

According to Google, Search Engine Optimization boils down to making incremental adjustments to parts of your website and waiting to see the effect it has. This looks and sound tedious, and when viewed individually, these changes might seem inconsequential. On the contrary, when combined with other equally nominal optimizations, these changes have a noticeable impact on site performance and user satisfaction, and your site user’s experience is directly related to performance in organic search results. In a nutshell, if you build it right, they will come. We call this a goal. If you have had the foresight to deliver something worthwhile for those users to do when they get there they will stay and do it. We call that a conversion. The result? A website that serves a purpose and has the search results to prove it, which is the point.

Lets review:

• Deliver valuable and interesting content.
• Build a site with technical SEO specs in mind.
• Define some goals.
• Help your users convert by making the site easy to understand and navigate.

These tips are by no means a magic bullet for instant Search Engine success. That takes attention to detail, patience, and most of all, time. Nothing happens immediately, but if you are patient and diligent in your efforts you will undoubtedly find that as your user experience improves, your site search performance improves as well.