A Website is Like a Banana Split

A banana split isn’t a banana split without the banana. It’s just a plain Jane sundae. Likewise, without the ice cream, it’s just a weird banana with chocolate sauce and nuts. Leave off the chocolate and nuts, and you may as well throw the banana and ice cream in the blender for a smoothie.

SEO is like that. The content is like the banana. You have to split it between the site and the net for it to really work. It doesn’t do any good if no-one ever gets to see it, so you have to link it together with the scoops of ice cream so people can get back and forth.

The whipped cream is your pay per click campaign. It floats on top, making it look so tasty people have to dip in just to check it out. Hot fudge sauce is your advertising dollars. You have to be careful, or they will spill over the edge and be gone before you know it!

Chopped nuts are your keywords, sprinkled in judiciously where they do the most good. You don’t want to overdo it, but without them the split just isn’t complete. Finally, a widget, gadget or other neat piece of link bait is your cherry on top.

If you build your banana split carefully, you will have a website that is appealing, balanced and contains what many would consider all the necessary components for a good time.

On the other hand, lets look at what happens when you leave out an ingredient.

If you don’t have a banana, you got nuthin’. Your site will languish and die in a puddle of melting ice cream. No amount of cherries will save you! You HAVE to have good strong content or you may as well forget it. The nuts are important too, don’t get me wrong, but the banana, man… the banana is the foundation of the thing.

Next, the ice cream. I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream, right? Ice cream is universal. It holds everything else together. Your link network has to be strong to hold together your content on the link and translate back to the content on your site in the form of traffic and PageRank.

Hot fudge sauce. You might have a little bit of advertising dollars, or a whole gooey pile, but unless you use them wisely they won’t be enough to keep you going. Use the sauce to shore up your whipped cream. A good pay per click campaign can translate into loads of revenue!

Don’t forget the cherry. You already know how link bait can make your website go viral. This bonus traffic is really the perfect top off for a well done split – I mean site.

There are things you can add once you get up and running. A little caramel sauce in the way of an AdSense enrollment can help you mix it up, or even a nice pineapple or strawberry flavored affiliate program.

Just remember that it takes all the ingredients to make a whole, and don’t leave any of them out!