A must-read article on SEO
Last week, I got a phone call that rattled me.
“Wanda,” the sole marketing person for a small business, called to discuss the possibility of writing copy for her company’s new website. From lo these many years of experience, I know a small business website typically requires only 8 to 20 pages.
Her SEO consultant advised creating a 75-page website!
Wanda’s company makes one product, with a wide variety of applications. In the proposed SEO strategy, about 60 web pages should have IDENTICAL content except for the keyword phrase.
Why was this an issue?
- For Wanda’s business, creating the new website would be exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming.
- For the website visitor, this would be a navigation nightmare.
- And for the Google SEO robots visiting Wanda’s website? They could actually penalize the website!
Here is a must-read article on SEO.
SEO expert Marie Haynes wrote this easy-to-read article for “the rest of us” — those of us who are interested in SEO yet not immersed in technicalities such as canonicals and crawl errors. (http://tinyurl.com/olesugd)
The key point of Marie’s article is that, more than ever, Google puts the emphasis on – and rewards – relevant, original, useful, pithy content. On the flip side, Google penalizes websites with tons of duplicate content, as in the example mentioned above. 
No trickery. No gamesmanship.
When it comes to SEO strategies, content is king.
Here’s my longstanding advice:
- Whether you blog frequently or rarely, ensure your blog postings are relevant to your readers, contain useful information and, like Goldilocks’ favorite things, are not too short or too long.
- In your web copy and blog postings consciously include organic SEO keywords. For example, if you are a speaker/consultant who speaks to and consults with Colorado-based healthcare organizations including hospitals and rehab clinics, then be sure to weave in these organic, logical keywords.
- Don’t spend your precious time or budget trying to trick SEO robots. Instead, focus on providing great content and advice for your real-live human readers. They’ll be happy and will revisit your website – and so will the SEO robots!