Well, not you, but your website. If your website could talk, it might ask you, “Does mySQL look fat in these jeans?”.
Thankfully, you could answer that question without hesitation, “It’s your inner beauty that matters”.
Search Engines are largely an un-superficial bunch. While the way your website looks does impact user behavior (which may or may not subsequently impact search performance), the look of your site is not that important to search engines. That’s not to say that making it sexy isn’t a good idea!
Fact is, despite Google having Goggles, search engines cannot see, so in the digital realm every ugly duckling out there has the opportunity to become a very desirable swan. And obtain solid rankings.
How to Make Your Site Attractive To the Engines:
The boot camp phase consists of getting your ducks in a row, and harvesting all the low hanging fruit. By paying close attention to the “inner-beauty” of your website, you will be putting yourself ahead of much of the competition.
- Does your website load quickly?
- Is it available? Or do you have regular server outages?
- Is your site architecture well-planned?
- Do you have quality internal links in place?
Once you have a handle on the basics, you’ll have already made your website quite attractive to the engines. It’s time to take it a step further.
How to Make Your Site Sexy:
While you can cover a lot of ground by simply making your site attractive with some of the considerations above, you can sexify your site (like that word?) and make it simply irresistable to the bots and algorithms. This helps put you in the position to then work on becoming irresistible to your visitors.
- Build Links
- Continue Creating Content
- Be Social
- Google Gets Beer Goggles (And Bing Does, Too)
High quality, relevant links are like tight jeans to the search engines. When you build quality links and point them to various places within your website, the bots won’t be able to take their eyes of your package. Er, content.
Everything that’s good. Written, video, photos, user generated. No matter what the form, consistently creating content is like phalloplasty for your website (wonder what kind of spam we’re going to get in the comments for using “phalloplasty”?).
Get out there and meet people. You’re never going to get asked to the prom sitting at home. Participate, interact, be active. It can attract like minded people to your site, and you can also feed in your social activity to different places on your pages.
Ever see a site ranked ahead of you for no obvious reason? Lots of spammy links, thin content, poor site structure, yet there it is occupying a coveted location in the search results.
How did it get there? Well, it’s hard to understand exactly, so to simplify it a bit: algorithms get beer goggles too. Algorithm changes are, in a way, like sobering up after a wild party. Eventually things fall back into order. You have to pay attention, but the algorithm can’t be your sole focus.
Create good content and a good SEO maintenance schedule, and the readers and rankings will follow.
Staying In Shape Online
Just like in the real world, some are seemingly born with “it”. However, when you peel back the surface, it’s very clear: You have to work for it.
Websites are just like humans, in a way. It’s all to easy to let yourself go. One day you’re going for an early morning five-miler; the next day you might find yourself sitting on the couch eating Twinkies while a Jefferson’s re-run flickers on the TV and wonder what the hell happened.
Same thing with your website. Let it go, neglect it, and before you know it you find yourself knocked completely out of the rankings.
How do you keep your sites sexy?
Tags: ideas, low hanging fruit, Pat Strader, SEO, upkeep