An email to a client in response to an SEO pitch from Web.Com

I think it’s a little disingenuous of Web.com to explain search engine optimization in such simple terms. Basically, the secret to search engine optimization is building good targeted content and receiving a large number of quality inbound links specifying you as an authority in your keyword space. The chances of coming up for such general terms as fashion and paris with a newly founded blog and content in page range under 100 is not good.

This is akin to starting a blog on “red velvet cake ice cream” and hoping to come up in the first few pages for the term “ice cream” or “desert”. Those results would be dominated by such companies as Ben & Jerry’s and Dreyers, who have a lot of content, have a ton inbound links (people linking to them), and probably spend thousands of dollars per month on search engine optimization services.

Parlaying the example above, you would be better served by trying to optimize for the term “red velvet cake ice cream” in which, if you went about it correctly, titled your page and website as such, peppered that term throughout your blog posts, and had other websites linking to you using that term as the anchor text, then you have a much better chance of ranking. It’s not as sexy as “ice cream”, but at your current scale, it is a reachable goal, and your visitors will be much better qualified (meaning, they will get what they’re looking for).

So, the case above pertains to you in that you may want to optimize for the term “paris fashion blog” or “paris runway fashion blog” or some related term. This would be effective, while trying to optimize for “paris” or “fashion” at your current scale, would not be.

Think about a term that best fits what your website is about, matches what and how you think people are searching for it and then send that along to me. We can work to optimize for that term.

Search engine optimization is a pretty involved and complex practice that surprisingly works on pretty basic rules. I think in your case, the primer I’ve given you above can help you much more than the Web.com SEO Analysis results.

Post written by Ed Reckers

Founder and lead web development consultant at Red Bridge Internet : San Francisco WordPress Developers and Consultants.

Leave a Reply