Vox Fortis Communications

Thanks to the popularity of My Puppy Can Teach You Marketing, it’s now time for the next lesson in the series: My Puppy Can Help You Understand Basic SEO - Lesson #1.

I’m not talking about crazy blitzing to get your site into the #1 ranking in some ungodly amount of time. I don’t practice that stuff anyway, though I’ve been asked to. What do you, as a business or site owner, need to understand about search? My puppy has the answer, thanks to her piles of sticks. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read the first entry already, wouldja?) Instead of how selecting her sticks is like marketing, let’s look at how it relates to search engines.

It might seem like the first question should be: Does Google even know you have a stick? It’s not. That comes at the end. Let’s start with the foundation.

What’s your stick all about?

The search engine only has a few precious ways to figure out what your stick looks like: what the site has on it, what other sites point to it, and when they’re pointing, what words they’re using.

The only thing you have absolute control over is the structure of your site and what you’re telling Google about it. When my pup looks at all the sticks in the woods outside (and trust me, there are plenty of them) she knows what she sees…some are bigger, some are smaller, some are brown, some are decomposing.

Don’t let Google think your site is of the decomposing variety…splintered, unfocused, and basically dead and useless. (Unless that’s your thing. Hey, on the Internet there’s room for everyone.)

Let’s assume you want to be brown and full of yummy bark (which, by the way, she skillfully peels off and spits out.) Your bark is that outside layer, the first thing the search engine looks at. It sees your url, which nowadays, can be very hard to make straightforward and relevant. It looks at your page titles, your meta data, and what your pictures are named. It’s peeling away the bark, and trying to figure out what pile you belong in.

The first thing I see a lot of clients rush toward is the body copy and keyword-stuffing in that regard. That won’t do you much good until Google looks at your site’s foundation first and figures out if you’re a log, a twig, if you fell from a Maple or a Spruce. Make the process easier for it (and better for you) by using those precious keywords here FIRST.

You’re reading one of the most impatient people on Earth, who wants to jump into customer-facing content like it’s a drug habit. I get it. But, you have to think bigger picture and in a more methodical manner when dealing with search engines. They were written by engineers for goodness’ sakes, so get in that mindset and make the behind-the-scenes foundation solid before you do anything else.

Stayed tuned for Lesson #2 of the Puppy SEO Series this week: finding your keywords.