SEO: Winning the popularity contest

Think back to high school for just a minute. You may not want to, but give it a try. Remember the pop­u­lar kids? The ones who drew a con­stant crowd of friends around them? They tended to be good-looking, well dressed, artic­u­late, out­go­ing, and in shape. Am I right? The pop­u­lar kids had a col­lec­tion of qual­i­ties that made them stand out and attract oth­ers to them.

On the flip side of this were the “uncool” kids who strug­gled to get noticed. Some sim­ply didn’t make the effort to acquire the qual­i­ties that attract oth­ers. Others did, but they had a tough time attain­ing those qualities.

Fast for­ward to today. The rules that dic­tate high school pop­u­lar­ity are now what apply to your web site. It’s got to win the attrac­tion of search engines (and in turn, vis­i­tors), and it needs a cer­tain col­lec­tion of qual­i­ties to do that. It’s got to look good and be in great shape. It needs to be well con­nected and have an out­go­ing per­son­al­ity. And it’s got to have qual­ity con­tent that draws a crowd.

How can your site com­pete in this online pop­u­lar­ity con­test? It needs a strong search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) strategy.

At Stride, we build in a basic level of organic SEO into every web­site we launch. But that’s just the begin­ning. To have a web site that ranks well on Google and other search engines, you can’t just “set it and for­get it” — you need a plan for reg­u­lar opti­miza­tion and main­te­nance. We col­lab­o­rate with many clients on strate­gies for SEO that improve and main­tain a high level of vis­i­bil­ity, and it works. For busi­nesses that rely on a con­stant stream of new vis­i­tors, espe­cially those using generic key­word searches, this ongo­ing work is absolutely critical.

So how does your site rank? If it’s strug­gling to get noticed, it might be time for an SEO strat­egy. I’ll explain more about this process, and the basics of search engine opti­miza­tion, in my next blog post. Stay tuned!