Product Description
by Stoney Degeyter (Author)
When it comes to building your online presence there is only one logical place to start: your website. Your website is you. You own it. You control it. Any presence you build outside of your website isn't yours to keep. It may be a reflection of you, but when the lights go out on any entity you don't fully own or control, a piece of you disappears with it. What happens if Facebook cancels your account? Or Twitter bans you from their platform? Can you get your content back? Nope. It's gone forever. And most of the time, without an opportunity to appeal. All your hard work building your web presence is wiped out with a snap of the fingers. This is why you need to have a website to call "home." If your web host turns off the lights, no problem. Take your backups to a new web host and turn them back on again. You control your website. You-and only you-decide your fate. This means you get to decide how deep, how wide, and how tall to build your web presence. You can't do that with any other online platform. Your website is the most critical part of building a successful and effective web presence. Build a Winning Web PresenceAnyone who has been involved in digital marketing for any length of time can attest that one of the most critical factors of online success is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I don't care much for the term SEO because we don't optimize search engines. That's what the algorithm tweakers at Google do. We optimize websites. It just so happens that we optimize them for search engines, but we optimize them for our visitors as well. I would also argue that optimizing for visitors is far more important than optimizing for Google or Bing. That's not to say search engines aren't important. They are. However, search engines are not your customers. They don't buy your products or services or click on your ads, people do. And that makes optimizing your website for people the most important thing you can do. The good news is, it's not an either/or situation. You optimize for both search engines and visitors at the same time. Great search engine optimization is just great visitor optimization. If you think about it, Google's only job is to provide highly relevant links to searchers based on what they are looking for. Or, to put it more succinctly, deliver access to websites that their searchers will love. Historically, digital marketers have considered top rankings to be the goal of their optimization efforts. That's flawed logic. Rankings are not the goal, they are the reward for a job well done. A top search engine ranking is the trophy for having a website that your audience loves. Google doesn't make the winners; it simply rewards them. Want to create a website that resonates? One that searchers and visitors find worthwhile? Then this book is for you. There's not enough paper in the world to cover every aspect of website optimization. Nonetheless, the book you are reading is a comprehensive guide to mastering the art of website optimization. I have no doubt that you will find it valuable as you push forward in your optimization efforts.
