How I Almost Committed SEO Suicide

That’s right.  SEO suicide, right here on the Clerical Advantage website. I’ve been preaching for ages about the wonders of building your business website with WordPress and the added benefits and flexibility of combining that with the Headway Theme.  I’ve ranted about the great SEO value of using both and I did something that could have nixed all of that SEO goodness without even knowing it.

Embarrassing?  You betcha!

Luckily I got some expert advice from the one and only Michael Martine (aka Remarkablogger) and now not only is my site no longer suicidal, I can share with you what I did wrong so that you don’t make the same mistake.

Here’s the low down.

I’m an odd mix of tech geek and creative free spirit.  This means that I like to play around with graphics and design when it comes to my website.  Some people think it’s awesome; others don’t care for my ‘cutesy’ look.  Hey, it’s my party and… well, you know what I mean.  And while I do let that free spirit creativity loose on my websites, the tech geek side of me is much more businesslike and understands the importance of SEO.  So when I got the opportunity to ask the man I consider the SEO rock star about my home page here at Clerical Advantage, I jumped at the chance.

This is what he said:

Ugh! That’s the last thing you want one of your rock star idols to tell you right?  Well for me it was the absolute best thing he could have said. And this is why:

I had created graphics for everything on my home page, but there was no text.  Well, to be more specific, I had worked all of the text into the graphics, there was no real text on the page.  Big no-no.

So what’s a creative free spirit to do?

She listens to the expert and reworks those images into background images for text leafs*. She plays around with the font settings for her headers a little bit because with Headway she can, and she ends up with something that the tech geek side of her can be happy with too.

My home page still looks pretty much the same, but SEO wise it’s been given a new lease on life.  Not to mention that now I can link to more internal areas of the website in that text.  It’s one of those things like a V8… you whack yourself in the head and wonder why you didn’t think of it in the first place.

And now you know how close I came to committing SEO suicide and how to make sure you don’t do the same thing.

Pssst…. You may be wondering just how I managed to get access to Michael Martine to ask my question?  I took part in the Headway theme Twitter chat Wednesday night and he was the ‘guest’ answering questions about SEO.  Twitter is good for more than just tweeting your latest post, so take advantage of chats about the things you want to know more about, you might just get some great advice from one of your rock star idols.

Psst…psst… a leaf is one of the design building blocks you get to play with when you use the Headway Theme for WordPress.