Why do I have to optimize my website? What does it actually mean to optimize a web site? Is it really that important?
If anybody has tried to explain how Google and other search engines like Bing actually gather information and then spit it back out when you search for something, you’ve probably heard terms like “spider”, “bots”, “index”, etc. If you’re not a web designer or perhaps you’re new to SEO and digital marketing, you probably just smiled and nodded, not fully comprehending the explanation you’ve just been given. Well, let’s try to change that with a real world scenario that explains why it’s important to have your site optimized.
The Scenerio
Let’s pretend for a minute, that you’re Google. Imagine you’re at the head of a room with a 100 people waiting for an audition. There are 10 rows, with 10 people on each row, and a middle isle. Any minute from now, the assistant with the clipboard (a potential customer visiting Google.com) is about to open the door and ask you for a specific group of people. These people will begin their audition, which will be the equivalent of showing up on the search engine results page (SERP’s).
At this point, you’ve already gone down the aisle and cataloged the number of people there are, what they’re wearing, their eye color, their hair color, men, women or children etc. This act of cataloging the various types of people in the room is what’s called “indexing” in SEO terms. Indexing means that the various bots and spiders of the internet have crawled a site and categorized it based on its content as well as several other factors which we’ll get into in later post. Once a site is indexed, it’s ready to be returned in a search result … or is it?
Back to our audition scenario. Finally, the assistant opens the door and ask, “Can you send in all the folks with blue eyes, please?”. You look down at your chart that you’ve already made after you “crawled” and “indexed” everybody in the room, and start to call out names one by one. You think you’ve sent everybody to the audition room that has blue eyes, however … when you were going row by row (crawling) making your list, there were 8 people wearing sunglasses and two people wearing sombreros. Because of this, you never actually cataloged (indexed) the eye color of 10 people because you couldn’t see their eyes.
These 10 people are the equivalent of a web site that is not optimized. If they’re wearing anything to obstruct you (Google) from seeing their eye color, how are you suppose to gather (crawl) information about their eye color and record it (index)?
For those 10 people who wore sunglasses or sombrero’s, they will never get the part because you never knew to call them. Think of your web site as one of those 100 folks in that room and the assistant with the clipboard as a potential customer, performing a Google search to look for your services and products. If your website is wearing sunglasses, the person at the front of the room (Google) is not going to call your companies website. What does this mean? This means you’ll never get the call and miss out on potential new business.
Is My Website Optimized?
So now you’re probably asking yourself a few quotations. “Is my website optimized?”, “How do I know if my website is optimized or not?” In our upcoming blog posts, we’ll explore these topics that will help answer this questions and provide building blocks for you to better understand SEO in general and with that, help your business grow.
If you need any help with optimizing your website, let us give you a free site audit. Our site audit will let you look under the hood of your website to see what’s working and what’s not working.
Contact Us today to get started.