How to see SEO as a piece of art
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the main processes you must take into account in order to make your organization really visible on the web. SEO is a way to organize the information that you present in your website. Through it, search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo increase their likelihood to make your organization stand out among all those others belonging to the same area of interest for different people on the web.
To achieve a successful SEO for your organization, you must keep in mind that search engines will rank websites according to certain factors introduced in their algorithms. These factors include things like:
- The keywords and phrases that people may use to find you on the Internet,
- The informative and seductive quality of the titles that you employ in your website,
- The reputation of your website on the web, which relates to the links that come to it from other websites,
- The fact that your website has enough flexibility to be searched on multiple platforms (desk computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and so on),
- The way in which your website esthetically appeals to those persons interested in your organization, by means of media such as videos and pictures.
One way to integrate all these factors successfully is to see your SEO process as a work of art. Think about the following tips when you go into it.
Plan ahead
Art is usually seen as a product of inspiration. People sometimes imagine artists waiting under a tree for some ideas to come to their heads from the sky. But what a real artist does is very different from that popular image. Artists plan ahead. They determine beforehand what they want to communicate, and according to that, they choose the best means to do it.
SEO is similar to art in which it also requires a great deal of planning. Keywords, phrases, and titles do not come from the sky. They must be selected carefully, depending on the goals that you have in mind for your website. You also need to think about strategies to improve the reputation of your website, and these strategies require a lot of work. For instance, it is important to decide in advance on which sort of websites you would like to find links to your own website, and plan those strategies accordingly. Take also into account how appealing you want your website to be. Do some research to decide how you do not want your website to look like, and pay attention to those ideas that you find somewhere and can improve.
Master the technique
An artist knows how to get things done. She knows her art. Of course, there is also room for improvisation in any artistic form, given that any project may always take routes that nobody envisioned at the beginning. But even improvisation has its own techniques, no matter whether you are talking about music, dance, theatre, or any other artistic form that you may have in mind. Great artists are in general great masters of the techniques required to communicate their own worldview, even in those situations in which they need to improvise.
A successful SEO process also relies heavily on a great knowledge of a huge range of techniques. It is not enough to be really good at coding and be able to crack a search engine’s algorithm. Besides that, you need to have good lexicographical abilities and writing skills, understand different marketing processes, design appealing websites, among many other tasks. And for this, you most of all need people, that is, a team with the appropriate skills to always get things done. Think of the SEO for your website as the outcome of an artistic workshop in the Renaissance — not the work of a solitary genius, but rather the work of different, very skilled minds collaborating together to achieve a common goal.
Know your audience
Artists know very well that their work will never appeal to everyone. Writers may, for instance, talk often about the kind of ideal reader that they would like to have for their books. And by that they imply that some publics may be more interested in their work than others. And that it is fine, because although a writer would always love to reach an audience as ample as possible, at the same time she is completely aware that not all people are necessarily looking for what she can offer them in her book.
Your SEO requires the same ability of the artist to know well the audience that you want to target with your website. Imagine what would happen if your website ranked really high in searches about oranges, but your organization only sells apples. That would be a clear example of ignoring the real audience that you want to target, and it would result in a huge amount of wasted time and resources. Better than trying to have the most popular website on the whole world of Internet, try instead to focus on having the most popular website among all those people who are really interested in what your organization has to offer for them. And do not worry if they seem to form a rather small group of people at the beginning. They will surely spread the word for you afterwards.
