SEO does not “run itself”

I hear this a lot.  Clients or friends will tell me “Well once you set the SEO up then it runs itself”.  Umm, no it doesn’t.  SEO is not a one time thing and often times you can put more work into it months down the line than what you do at the beginning.   There are many aspects of SEO:

• Constantly monitoring traffic – there are so many ways to look at traffic to your site and there are also so many different things you can do to a website that affect this, almost immediately.
• Constantly monitoring your competition – a true competitor will be adapting their tactics to yours.  The moment you thing they are sitting still and letting things “run themselves” then you will get beat in the rankings
• Changing with the market – there are many things that can affect how people search and what they are searching for.  Things like the economy, news reports, consumer fears, and momentum.  You have have to stay on top of these trends.
• dead language – pay attention to how people talk from month to month, this impacts the searches.

Proper SEO will not run itself.  The determining factor in your ranking is often the number of quality links and these aren’t going to magically appear.

Marketing One Product

The recent post about “Apple and the ability to Focus“, over on Brett’s Blog got me thinking about our latest project.

 We recently launched the “Skeeter Defeater“, it’s a mosquito repellent that sprays automatically..twice a day.    Cool little product and the faq page has some interesting information on mosquitoes.

But, the interesting part of this project is the fact that the website is really selling only one product.  There are some variations of the skeeter but really it’s just one product.  We managed to create a lot of content about one product and I think the website came out exactly how we wanted it to but that’s always going to be a challenge with only one product. 

Also, the website is running a store and with only one product the design of the store is going to look differently than your “normal” store.  We have a few “categories” but really are users aren’t going to be shopping by category.  They will either want one or more skeeters.  So we tried to limit what was on the store as not to give people too many options per page.  I think that’s an important part of web design…don’t give people too many options.  Instead, guide them to where you want them based on what behaviors they have displayed on your website up to that point. 

It’s the “ability to focus” but applied to your website.  As a web designer, you can help focus the attention of your website visitors on not only what you are trying to sell them but also what they need to buy based on their behavior on each page.