New SEO project, new CMS…

My last SEO project couldn’t be possible without learning new CMS (Content Management System). Yeah, that seems to be an interesting trend – diversification of CMS platforms. Almost every website I have worked on last year differs from the others with its CMS. This time it was CMS October, PHP-based, with lots of special files here and there. Yes, there is a nice admin dashboard, too, but it just assists you in navigating among the set of different templates, service files, and well-developed structure of folders. CMS October reminded me of old times Linux where you can do almost everything manipulating with… well… mostly text-based files.

The project was pretty big – we had three language versions and a pretty large catalogue of products. It was a factory producing polymer pipes and manholes for drainage systems. As you can see the lexicon differed a lot from my previous projects, but it just made the job more interesting.

  

Search Engines are the oldest Artificial Intelligent online services

Sometimes we simply need to shift our focus to see obvious but very important things. It happens to me yesterday after watching another SEO guru. I suddenly and clearly realized where I have met AI before during my life long experience of web content writing… Surely, it’s a search engine… It sounds so simple but it moves some keys inside my brain….

Well, as for me, SEO is a part of digital marketing – I do profound market research through search requests shaping so called semantic core or better to say market demand in the sector of interest. I believe that only clear understanding what potential customers want helps to tailor website content to be unique in satisfying users’ needs. I’m pretty sure we are in one boat with search engines developers on this.

The second part of my job as a Search Engine Optimization specialist is to communicate with search engines to give our target audience something unique, what exactly they need. Here is where search engine’s black box begins… What does a search engine rely on while evaluating website contents? We both seem to want the same – to provide the most relevant answer to a search request. Here is where machine learning comes out, either…

When we have something unique on a website, a machine just gives a corresponding page at the top after searching through its data base. I have checked it many times. It works well – Uh, I would be surprised if it didn’t. When our content is not unique, some other factors start playing... but again, the things unique for a given website give advantages. That’s one of reasons why so-called “long-tail” request strategy is a basic one for SEO – the longer search request, the more possibility to provide unique content.

I keep my SEO experiments and promise to share results here, in my blog. Thanks for reading! Stay in touch! 

  

When does SEO should actually start?

Every SEO expert knows that there are really hot keywords, for which people are even ready to fight for. I recently took a part in a real estate project with word “sale” in the title. It turns out to be a blessing for search engines, because name and the website address contain a very popular keyword, but… it was my first time to be banned in any place online, where I just tried to mention it. Yeah, that may sound funny – word “sale” is filtered by many anti-spam systems, not without reason, of course.

This example points out to a time when actually SEO should start. I believe that preliminary research of search requests should be performed before launching a website at all. In fact a SEO expert often has to fix problems created on earlier stages of a web project. Preliminary research would help to choose most efficient brand and domain names, which could be very helpful as we see.

SEO should be a part of the whole development process,
not just fixing something on the way...