Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

Today I must have exchanged a dozen emails with a customer, we’ll call him Bob, discussing the role of the apostrophe in the web site address.  I kept referring to “Bob’s Shoes” and he kept telling me, “No no, somebody already has Bob’s Shoes, I want customers to know that I’m bobsshoes all one word.”

I kept trying to explain that when you *tell* somebody your address, like, verbally, then you don’t spell it and you don’t tell them about the spaces and the apostrophes, so “Bob’s Shoes” and “bobsshoes” are basically the same thing.  His point was that depending on which one you typed into the search bar, Google returned different results.  Therefore it was important to control which one the user was more likely to type in.

This all being within a week of launching the site, which barely has any content.

It is easy to get caught up in the trap of “If I’m going to do this I want to do everything perfectly.”  Guess what? You’re not going to, for a number of reasons.  First because you don’t know how to be perfect at it, there are too many variables at work.  Second and even more importantly, there’s no such thing as perfect because you’re aiming for a moving target.  Did you know that Google and the other search engines change their ranking algorithms?  There is no perfect set of rules for how to optimize.  It’s an ongoing process.

This mentality extends to your whole online experience if you let it. Every blog post takes 2 weeks, 5 editing passes and ends up reading like  a magazine article.  That’s nice for quality, but all your readers see is one post every two weeks.  You’re much better off with a couple of posts a day, both to get your SEO up and to stay in touch with your audience.