The 10 commandments (optimized for search engines)

Divine inspiration is certainly not needed to write 10 SEO commandments. Perhaps the inspiration came more from … machines? The following 10 commandments cover the most important basic rules in dealing with snooty robots to which we should direct our texts, to lively links to which we should pay our respects.

1) You shall only believe in robots.

Who do you write your website for? For humans, not for robots, it’s pretty clear. However, Google does not send people to search for websites, but robots, web crawlers or Googlebots … And they quickly calculate which results should be at the top of the search engine. No matter how flowery you write your texts, people only click on what the search engine algorithms have placed at the top. And when people search for something, it’s usually on Google (>90%)!

2) You shall only believe in the word.

… because web design concerns just the … design part. About texts, or web texting, one hardly speaks. Keywords are literally … keys to success. You can only find the right keywords for your website if you search for them in a proper way. A typical web designer is hardly able to do this – she or he has dedicated herself / himself to design in the sense of a beautiful or functional layout. A copywriter likes to write some flowery flattery blah blah and does not know the meaning of keywords.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer/reader: When you sell stamps, don’t write “stamp sales” or “stamps to sell”, because that’s what no one is looking for. The keywords are “Buy stamps” or “Stamp Shop in Zurich”, because that’s what your customers are looking for. Your customers, but also the Google robots, judge your spelling and thus also your care and competence very hard. If you spell words incorrectly, some artificial intelligence will find them, but do not trust them.

3) You shall analyze yourself…

… right from the start. Google Analytics or another program is quickly installed, but you have to be an expert to know exactly where the visitors come from and how to interpret the data. Although the program gives some hints on how to optimize the website, industry-specific expertise and, above all, strong language skills are also required. It is best to follow the development of your website over several months, before and after an optimization, with an external service provider.

4) You shall not write a marketing blah-blah.

The most flowery adjectives bring the least on the web: “excellent”, “extraordinary”, outstanding”, “top”, “ingenious” certainly never appear in a search query by Jim Smith, let alone in a search query of your customers. So let these adjectives disappear from the web and write concrete things. Use adjectives that fit your product: e.g. “rinsable” fertilizer, or “shatterproof” guitar (for hard rockers, e.B.)

5) You shall not throw your web budget out the window.

You will often be tempted to spend a lot of money on obscure advertising and links to websites and very general business directories that themselves attract absolutely no traffic. You will see this at the latest when you analyze the data. First of all, you should take a look at which directories attract traffic at all. Most of the traffic probably goes through the search engines, so you should also invest the majority of your budget there, namely for SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and/or for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

6) You shall look good on all platforms

Many websites do not run on all devices or are e.B. not (yet) optimized for mobile devices (or “responsive”). Have your website tested for compatibility with different devices, and don’t be satisfied until it runs perfectly everywhere. Google has recently been rating websites that are optimized for mobile devices better.

7) You shall communicate, not inform.

Communicating is giving and taking. When you write something, don’t just put it on the website, but blog it, tweet it (if you have to), write it on LinkedIn or Facebook (depending on the target audience). Allow answers, do surveys and reviews, and exchange. Every report on social media brings potential additional traffic to your website.

8) You shall check who you are linking to

Backlinks, i.e. links from other websites to your own, are most valuable and often bring the best traffic in terms of quality. You can influence this by, for example.B communicating a lot (see above), or by specifically addressing suppliers, partners, customers and industry organizations. A small link as a thank you on your website does not hurt. And the text has to be correct!

9) You shall look below the surface of your website

A treasure trove of gold lies under the visible surface of your website: What is written in the (hidden) meta tags appears later on the search engine, images labeled “img0078” cannot be found by anyone (and the search robot is probably also a bit dazed), the titles of your pages are also decisive for the placement on the search engines and must certainly not contain complicated sequences of numbers and letters.  Good texting is also important under the surface!

10) You shall let your links live.

Dead links do not go down well with the search robots (or potential customers). Documents that you publish on the website, e.B. Pdfs, should also be linked correctly. And links bless the temporal more often than you think. It’s best to have the links checked constantly. There are external solutions for this if your agency does not offer you this.