If you don't talk in terms of things that people actually search for then you are going to struggle to rank well. Keyword research is often hard to sell to people that just "don't get it". We seem to have an abundant amount of potential clients, who are price sensitive, and try to get by without keyword research. You know the ones: “I know what I want to rank for. ''BlahABCblah'' is what people are searching for, I don’t need anyone to tell me that.”  What most people don't understand is that keyword research gives you insights that you can't get any other way. Experience can often slide over these fairly simple cracks of information, but if you can advise clients from an early stage of conversation, the importance of knowing the “best” terminology to use on a website, then the SEO and content writing job becomes a whole bunch easier.

I’m not only talking in terms of keywords, but the information and content structure of your website. I honestly believe that many SEO issues come as a result of a poorly themed and un-organized website structure. At Netmark Essentials, we call these “silos”. Eric Enge over at Search Engine Land talks about how information architecture is crucial to SEO.

This is obviously related to technical issues. If the search engines can't spider your page or read your content then it doesn't matter what the content says that you have on the website because it isn''''t going to help… and by that, I’m talking about flash websites.

This relationship is the difference between having a website passing content information to the search engines, and a website talking in the right language; that has decided the best way to make something look like a header can't possibly be to use the header tags. One of the things I love about SEO is that the majority of suggestions given to improve "optimization" also improve your website to users. It’s just plain common sense. If it really makes sense to do it, it will probably help. I've found that SEO done well often brings users and search engines together more than people like to admit. That way we can avoid the common argument of “the website should be written for search engines and not for the end user.”

Keep you eye on Netmark Essentials Blog… I know we’ll be discussing more about “silo’ing” in the future.

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