Search Engine Optimization. Sounds easy, just create some meta-tags and you’re all done. Right? WRONG!
SEO is not easy, in fact I’ve learned it is a hell of a lot of work. Not the back breaking work of, oh say, a construction worker, or a mason, or any of the manual labor trades. Just a lot of brain work and time. Lots and lots of time spend doing research, testing and re-testing ideas. Learning, doing analysis on what you’ve learned then un-learning that which seems to be just someone else’s random thoughts or even worse scam.
Did I just use the word scam in the same paragraph with SEO? I do not mean to imply that SEO is a scam. No, honest SEO is the results of a lot of hard, time consuming, work. But like just about any business there are those who will do their best to turn a quick buck without doing due diligence in providing a good product.
So, do I consider myself a knowledgeable SEO consultant? Not even close. Maybe in a year or two I’ll be able to call myself a SEO NOOB. No, I got into SEO quite by accident.
I’m a retired IT/computer specialist who spent the last couple of years just building web based front ends for internal databases for the government. Kind of boring stuff, and SEO was not even a remote consideration. After retiring from the government I developed a couple web sites for some local organizations,and again, since they were not-for-profit, just informational, SEO was not a consideration. At least not at the time of inception. Let me tell you, things are changing. There will be more on these sites at a later date.
So, how did I get into SEO? Well, one of my neighbors has started her own reality business with another lady . A non-franchised locally owned business. Realizing the importance of a web presence they had contracted with a local web developer to design and build them a web site. The company did a nice job using WordPress and some pretty cool custom templates. Trouble was, the site was not getting any hits. The web developer puff-pawed the SEO notions saying that content was the only way to get hits and that it took time.
Well, I’ve learned that this is sort of true but that there is a whole lot more that can be done to help get more traffic to the site.
Register the site with the big three – Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft. Utilize places like DMOZ, Best of The Web, and other reputable directory services. Do keyword research and to identify and use keywords in titles, heading tags, URLs, and within the content. This latter part, keyword research, is time consuming and can be somewhat hit or miss. I suspect that one becomes more accurate with time and experience, and knowledge of the business that you are working for.
I’ve found some tools that seem to help. The All-in-one-SEO plug-in for WordPress has helps make the job a bit easier. It is not necessarily an end-all-cure-all, but a good tool for helping manage a lot of the aspects of the site’s SEO.
Creating a XML site map and getting that information into the big three helps a lot as well.
So, what have our results been? We have seen the hits more than quadruple. The bounce rate has gone down about 25%. This is after a little over 3 months of continuous work. Are we done? Not even close. We are working on building links with related businesses such as local banks, insurance agents, and other businesses. I’m continuing my education by reading tons of material on SEO from some pretty good blogs, plus a pretty darn good book written by John Jerkovic called the SEO Warrior from O’Reilly press. Education and practice is going to be the key to being successful in this particular project.
So, will I continue to work in the SEO field? Not sure. I guess it depends on a number of factors. Fortunately, I don’t have to depend on it for my main source of income which could be bad or good. I do know that it will require a great deal more study and research. I know that there are no real short cuts. That it does require a substantial investment of time and energy to do it correctly and I’m not going to do it if I can’t do it correctly. I do find SEO interesting and reading lots of other folks ideas and thoughts, even when some of the blogs seem to be at odds with other blogs and ideas. I find that I learn the most from these points of disagreement. Good arguments and presentation go a very long way in helping me reach my own conclusions.
I’ll try and write more about my experience with SEO as I go along, but I’m a horrible blogger, and very lazy when it comes to writing. So please don’t expect a new post for a bit.