The world of Web Design and SEO is full of analogies trying to explain in concrete terms what SEO is all about. Here is my contribution.

Turn your Imaginations on

Let’s pretend it is 2012 (or 2004 if you are the nostalgic type) and the housing market is picking up. You’ve got a house and you’re trying to sell it, but there’s tons of competition. Realtors are not telling their customers about your house because they don’t think their customers would be interested in it. Your house sits on the market for a while and you start to worry that you’ll never be able to make a profit off of it.

Then you start to spruce up your house. You have a landscaper come in to make the outside of your house more picturesque. You renovate the kitchen so it feels more modern. You add on a master bathroom to add a little luxury and convenience. Before you know it, your house is getting noticed by realtors and you have more people coming to see your house.

This is how SEO works. You have a webpage, and you need to get it noticed by the search engines so it’ll get passed onto the users of the search engines. Getting a website noticed by search engines may sound like a cryptic and vague task, but like getting a house noticed by realtors, there is a fairly specific list of things that search engines look for.

That’s all?

This makes it sound like SEO is a piece of cake, but there’s more to it than that. Search engines have become sophisticated enough that they are almost impossible to fool. So, much like you couldn’t pass off a 3 bedroom ranch style as a 2 story colonial, you can’t convince the search engines that your automotive parts website is a good place to buy fish (why you’d want to fool a search engine in the first place is another question).

Something else to keep in mind is that SEO isn’t a magic can of whitewash which covers up existing problems in a site’s design. A new kitchen won’t help to sell a house if the foundation is cracked, and SEO can’t sell a website if the site architecture is poor. This is why it is key to work with a web design company who knows SEO when building or expanding your website.

Be careful or you’ll hurt yourself…

One final note: as is the situation with home improvements, if you are new to SEO, it is probably best to leave the work to the professionals.