SEO (search engine optimization) has been typically approached with the freer hand of cooking. Start with some main ingredients, add a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a dash of those for good measure – and voila! – you have a delicious masterpiece. Or so some of us hope. SEO, however, is more akin to baking, where leaving out an ingredient or making a substitution can keep all your best efforts from rising to the top.
There’s far more to SEO than meta tags and proper page titles. During this session we’ll take a closer look at how SEO overlaps with and touches upon branding, design, copy and marketing, both on and off the page. By planning your SEO efforts upfront, you’ll begin connecting with the intended audience, designing site architecture, informing the copy, developing an editorial calendar, identifying linking opportunities, in addition to aligning social media profiles and marketing messages.
Baking in SEO infuses another level of detail into creating your online presence as a credible authority to be noticed by search engines, and more importantly, forming the base layers of a positive visitor experience. Think of SEO as giving yourself a recipe to follow instead of figuring out what might be needed as you go along – or after the fact – to make the whole thing turn out right.