When I was a banker, we had the four C’s of credit: Character, Capacity, Collateral and Conditions. Those were assessments we lenders made in the pre-credit scoring days. I have no idea what’s going on now, as I’ve been out of the biz for 22+ years now, but I smiled when I read about Tony Wright’s SMX Speech last week. Wright, CEO and founder of Wright IMC, says that rather than studying correlations, SEOs should be more concerned with the four Cs of SEO:
- Content
- Code
- Connections
- Conversation
Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
Good, unique content is important. If you throw up a scraper site with nothing but a bunch of crap, nobody will want to link to it. But if you create solid content that people can use to improve whatever it is your site is about, you’ll get links and visits and all the social stuff that goes with that.
Then, comes the code. Want to make it easy on yourself? Let WordPress do it. There are so many theme choices now that you can’t get through them all in a year. And if you want your site to look better and different from everyone else’s , get a web developer to create a special theme for you. But using WordPress as the driving force behind your great content makes the spiders love you because WordPress is so easy to crawl.
If you’re not using WordPress, keep it clean and simple. Don’t have a gazillion links on your page. Don’t use iframes, and make sure that visitors can get anywhere on your site with three clicks of their mouse. Make things easy for spiders to crawl. Use proper Meta tags, and just streamline your code so that there are no spider traps or things for spiders to scratch their heads about.
Connections is about linking. You’ll naturally garner backlinks, proving you do the content portion of this 4c formula right. However, if you want bigger, badder, faster… There are lots of ways that you can pump up the volume. Press releases, articles posted on other sites (not directories), or quality Web directory submissions are three of those ways, and I find them to be most effective. But you can ask other webmasters for links, too. The only problem with that is that webmasters will want links back, and reciprocal linking just doesn’t cut the muster anymore. (No, it’s NOT mustard.)
And finally, conversation is what?… Social media. Do you have a way for people to find you on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, or Google+? That last one is really important, remember, so be sure to get the plugin for that or to add a tad of simple code to your page. It’s important if you want to show up in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). But you have to give people the opportunity. They won’t like or +1 or Digg you on their own, and the more people you have doing those things, the higher esteemed by the search engines your site becomes.
That’s not so hard when you think about it, right? Content, Code, Connections, and Conversation. When you boil things down to those simple ideals, you’re bound to have a much better presence in search.
