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SEO – The Recipe for Success

Last time we were talking about the recipe for SEO success and I equated SEO to a great chocolate chip recipe. Like a chocolate chip recipe, you can’t expect to get the same results if you forget to add all of the right ingredients. As I was pondering the similarities, I thought of another one. Many times, people think that you can do SEO a little at a time. But how would it work if you made a batch of cookies with the eggs and figured you’d add them later if the cookies tasted a little odd? Of course that wouldn’t work. You can’t just add eggs to a baked cookie. And there are some things that are fundamental to a great SEO recipe and can’t just be added later if things don’t taste right.

I know, many of you are thinking that the web is dynamic and can be changed at any time. Sure that’s true, but it’s much more difficult to improve a page’s validity with Google than it is to just do it right from the beginning. Once Google has tasted your recipe, they are less likely to believe that you’ve suddenly become a great cook (or SEO engineer in this case.)

Here’s a quick example. If you have a number of pages in your site, it’s likely that they weren’t all created on the same day. Google picks up on your pages as you create them, provided you’ve developed a site that’s regularly spidered by Google. If you want to see which pages Google has spidered, search Google for site:yourdomain.com. You’ll immediately see a list of all the pages that Google knows exist in your site. Some of the older ones will have link that says “cached.” Click one of those links. That will tell you in a box at the top the last time Google bothered to read through that page. I’m sure you’ll be surprised. While you may be thinking that Google loves your site and reads through it every hour, you may be surprised to see that Google is only bothering to read the pages that have changed regularly. Take your blog for instance. If you have developed a pattern of frequently changing your blog, Google may visit your site every hour or more to see if you have new content. But the other pages on your site that have not changed are not read again by Google. So might it be difficult to go back and try to fix them, to try and add eggs now. You could, but Google wouldn’t necessarily know you made any changes.

So how do you get Google to notice your changes so that your updated pages will be indexed again? We’ll get to that one later. Until then.

Chadd Bryant