So a couple of weeks ago I talked a little about SEO. Today, I want to talk about why you may need our help (or if not us, at least someone who knows what they’re doing) with SEO. And I thought I’d share some of my background and experience with you.
Just as a side note here, one of my favorite resources on SEO research is searchengineland.com. And if you really want to learn how to do SEO on your own, this is a great place to start. In their introduction into SEO they have this great chart, albeit a little dated, about 39 aspects of SEO.
This infographic shows most of the factors that have to do with whether or not you’re going to come up well in the search engine results. The article that goes along with this chart is pretty interesting. (To fully understand the chart, you’ll need to read the article.) If you have any desire to do search optimization on your own, I recommend reading it. Even giving it a once-over, just to get an idea of everything that is involved in SEO, would be a good idea. It’s very informative and can at least give you a basic idea of how SEO is done.
Getting My Feet Wet
In 1994, I went to work for a local company, Overton’s. Overton’s is a great company that sells watersports and marine items. (If you’re into watersports, they’re awesome!) When I first started we didn’t have a website. I worked in the call center at the time as a customer service representative. It was the early time of the internet. Dial up modems and AOL were still the way we connected back then.
(Some back story, I grew up a nerd. I took computer programming in high school and college and was an early adopter of just about every techy thing.)
When I heard they wanted an information-only website, I thought it was a mistake. The company would be missing out on being able to showcase their entire catalog of about 40,000 items online. I had heard of and studied databases for websites. I knew that if we wanted to put the whole catalog on the website, it would be time-consuming but not difficult. We just needed to build a website database of all our products.
With that in mind, I pitched an idea to our marketing department. I told them we should make a website that would sell all of the items online. They went for it. I was tasked with building the first database for our website. This launched my career in internet marketing.
From building to marketing the site, I was involved in all phases of the work. SEO was a big part of that. This was the early days of the web. We certainly made mistakes along the way, but we learned a ton too. During this learning time we developed a robust SEO process. This process fully integrated our database and tackled most of our issues. And we went from having no online sales to later selling almost exclusively online.
Garbage In-Garbage Out
Of course getting everything optimized with our new Overton’s database wasn’t perfect. If you had garbage (meaning terrible copy or no meta data or any other bad stuff) in the data, you therefore had garbage on the site. So one of our first tasks was deleting or transforming garbage data.
Because our database was built originally for the catalog, most of the copy was super short and not very descriptive; it also had lots of abbreviations (garbage for SEO). We had to go in and add descriptive copy to make it search engine friendly. We ended up having to do this for around 40,000 products to make sure we had all the right data and get rid of all the garbage that had been there from the start. It took a while to fix everything, but it was worth it. We were able to do very well with our SEO program and we sold tons of product this way.
Why You Need a VA Like Me for SEO Help
Search Engine Optimization on a smaller level is very similar. If you have garbage in your data (or website), it will effect your SEO performance. We can help you make sure that you don’t have hidden garbage. If your keywords and copy are not optimized you’re not going to perform well in searches either. We can make sure you have effective keywords and copy that are search engine friendly and optimized.
That infographic at the beginning of this post shows 39 SEO factors that influence SEO performance. That can be a little overwhelming to say the least. Managing SEO and manipulating those factors is no small task (see above article). Handing off this heavy task to a VA like myself can free up your time and energy towards the creative end of your business.
Launching and/or optimizing a website can be challenging (I know), but we’re here to help you through every step of the way!
