Emagine Web Marketing

SEO is Like Soup…

home title Posted by on Jan 24th, 2010 home title

Huh?  Yes, it’s a weird analogy but let’s just explore it a bit to see how it laddles out…

SEO – an acronym for Search Engine Optimization is the act of optimizing a website or blog to rank well for keyword phrases in the Search Engines.  (Google is still The King of the search engines with somewhere around 70% market share (the rest is distributed amongst Yahoo!, Bing, Ask & AOL.  SEO is highly mis-understood  because there is so much mis-information out there and so many people selling themselves as SEO experts.  While SEO is not really “rocket science”, there is alot to know and having years of experience in seeing  what works and what doesn’t certainly helps.  Experienced SEO professionals know that it takes a  combination of strategies to help sites come up in the top positions in the search engines results.

So let’s get back to the soup analogy.  The ingredients of our SEO soup include keyword research (finding out what keywords people use to search for products & services), on-page optimization (integrating the targeted keywords into the copy on the site), off-page optimization (writing unique, keyword-rich titles and descriptions for every page of your site), link building (building links that point to your website) and social media (spreading the word about your website online).  The goal of any solid SEO strategy is to make your site’s content easily found by the search engines and easily found and used by real people.  By making your site user-friendly, full of interesting content and building links to your site, you are ensuring that people interested in what you have to offer will find it.

As you know, it’s not just one ingredient that makes a great soup.  Just as with SEO, it is the combination of measures that make a site “great”  and rank well in the search engines.  Using quality ingredients makes a difference too, when I make soup I like to include the freshest meats, vegetables and herbs.  With SEO quality impacts the end result too, its not how many links you acquire, it’s how valuable, relevant and quality the sites are that are linking to your site.  It’s not the quantity of content you have on your site, it’s the quality and originality of the content and how many other people on the web find it valuable.

A great soup needs a stock to be – well, a soup.  SEO requires a stock of patience.  One of the most frustrating things is to wait to see how the search engines will rank your site once optimization efforts have been implemented.  But that is the nature of SEO and soup – you put your best effort and ingredients in and then you have to sit back and wait for the results.  As someone once said “a watched pot never boils” so it is with SEO, it’s best to implement your quality SEO strategies on the site and then “walk away” and let it all simmer.  Checking rankings daily will make you crazy, so give it a few weeks and then do some exploring of the SERPs (search engine result pages) and watch your website analytics to see if you have increased non-paid traffic to the site via your targeted keywords.

Like a watchful chef,  an experienced SEO professional is constantly evaluating (tasting) the strategies implemented and how the search engines are responding to the changes, adding this or that to get the perfect balance of  “ingredients”.

You can and should “spice up” your SEO soup by including social media (entering into conversations online that will build relationships with your allies and potential customers).  I’m calling social media the “spice” because social media can get “spicy” when your customers have a venue to express what they do and don’t like about your business.  However, using the feedback that you get via Social Media can be invaluable in growing and evolving your business.

Ever notice how soup always tastes better the next day?  Age matters in SEO too!  Understand that time can help you build a solid reputation with not only your target audience but also with the search engines.     Make a commitment to your website for the long haul, don’t throw in the SEO towel when you don’t get the rankings you want after trying one or two measures to improve your site rankings.

Do consult and  follow Google’s webmaster guidelines and don’t hire unethical/high-pressure SEO consultants.  If you do hire an SEO professional ask to be informed of the measures that will be taken on your site, and check Google’s guidelines to make sure that the measures being taken won’t hurt your site rather than help.

Be Sociable, Share!

Related Posts:



Author | Michelle Harrington of Emagine Web Marketing
Michelle is a web development and internet marketing professional dedicated to helping small businesses in Hawaii achieve success online. Michelle provides free advice, tips and how to's on the Small Business Internet Marketing Blog.


home title One Response home title
  1. Jason says:
    February 2, 2010 at 3:56 am

    To the point and written expertly. Getting the lowdown from someone that knows this stuff in-depth is really valuable to anyone that is trying to learn about it. SEO Consultants

line