Can you be found often enough to make it worth it?
SEO, or search engine optimization is the most important item to get your website earning for you. This blog post reminded me of a recent critique I had done for a client. The most important points are:
Know your competition. Who owns the sites in that are your close competition, what are they doing, and how are they doing in the search results competition.
Keep your site current. Web technology changes constantly. Every new thing is not necessarily for every site. Every year or so a significant shift is achieved. So review how many of your competition are moving with the times. If it is enough of them, you don’t want to look like yesterday’s news.
Be unique but not out there. People, and searchers are not different, like something special. This is not the same as liking a site that behaves in ways they have never seen before. Unusual search behaviours or purchasing procedures put people off. If it makes them uncomfortable or distrustful, they are going to leave without committing to you.
Have a descriptive blurb. Have you read the search results for your site? Does the blurb make you want to click your link?
Track and interact with your visitors. Do you know who is visiting you and when they visit? Even the most basic statistics can show you which state or country the visitor is from. More sophisticated statistics will also show when they visit and how they got to your site. Providing the visitor a means to interact with you increases your list and provides you with an opportunity to learn something more from them that is important for your business.
The end is to have a site that encourages visitors to look around and come back to you. Over optimization may take more work than the results are worth, but ignoring where technology and search engines are at will leave you with less and less visitors.
