Search Engine Optimization

SEO - One technique which everyone wants to crack on web. Its interesting that the technique is very old but still the belief is that someone will come and crack it for you.

I have been working on couple of websites for quite a while now and I try to get pulled into any material available to improve the organic search. But the truth is that the outcome of any such material does not boil down to any improvement.

I attended another session recently and one thing I learned there was that there is no consultant who can can help you improve SEO. Its in-house knowledge which plays an important part in improving the organic search. There are only two things involved:

1) Domain
2) Mindset

Domain - Only the business owner understands the domain and the USP. This needs a deep understanding of the customer base - Why would a customer come to you ? What will the customer search to reach you ? What you need to change so that customer prefers you over others ? What content you need to create which pulls customer to you ? What controversies are required to ensure customer get interested in you ? .... why what who ...

Mindset - Thinking like a developer who wrote the crawler. The mindset to understand on what would a developer would have done to ensure that customer gets what he wants. The mindset plays an important role as it help achieve the desired results. Though a consultant can help technically but its again in house knowledge which needs to blend with technology to have the right mindset.

 One of my websites is built upon Magento. They say that Magento is optimized for SEO but the fact is that there is nothing which can help unless the above two things are involved. Some examples:

1) The title - One mistake I used to do was to have same title for all the pages. Magento allows you to provide easy way to have separate title for each page.
2) Meta Description - Creareseo Magento Plugin makes life much easier for you.
3) Page Speed - Google PageSpeed and Yahoo YSlow are the best tools

BLOGS
Blogs are the most important contributors to SEO. Having unique content and having backlinks is what contributes the most.