This is a guest post provided by WebProfits Australia, a search engine optimization company with a sense of fun.

Comparing a website to a hot tub may not be everyone’s instant metaphor, but it’s pretty appropriate. Any website owner who’s been online for a while will appreciate some of the similarities. From SEO to basic maintenance, there really are similarities.  Here are ten of them that we’ve come up with, but you can probably discover a few more of your own.

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1. Websites can get too hot

If you’ve got a site with a blog and a lot of new material coming onstream all the time, the sudden surges of heat from users can be quite an experience.

2. Websites get mouldy

The website owner faced with cleaning a site of a lot of old materials, some of which have long since gone stale, will recognize that “clean the bathroom” effect, and the hard work involved.

3. The “bubbles” effect

A site which gets a lot of interest, like a bubble jet, can be a lot of fun, stimulating, and encourage you to have more hot tubs and open up more websites.

4. A pleasant experience

Hot tubs are more than just hot water. They’re a nice environment, and they’re also great inspirations, like any good experience which allows you to relax and think positively. Online, that can be a rarity, and like a hot tub, it’s an experience you actually try to have.

5. Expensive to run

Hot tubs can run up a bill, and so can some websites. The difference is that you’re sweating for a very different reason.

6. A great environment

Win lose or draw, a good website can be a miniature world, a really nice place to be, very like a good hot tub where you can just soak yourself in pleasures.

7. A great place to form relationships.

Never mind the endless babble about online relationships. If you’ve ever had people that love your stuff on your website, and contribute a lot to it, that’s a real relationship, the sort people try to have in hot tubs.

8. Steamy and foggy

Unless you get your hot tub temperature sorted out, you can have a sort of steam lodge effect where your interest in self preservation becomes a major consideration. Website environments can get steamy, too. If you’ve ever experienced a 100 post thread with people blurring issues and reducing visibility to individual words, you might agree that “foggy” pretty much covers it.

9. A place to get away from it all

The hot tub is usually located in the inner sanctum of a home. The website, if it’s a favorite, is also located in the mental sanctuary zone of the mind. So it’s insular and self indulgent, so what? It’s a great way to revel in the place.

10. A place to think

A website is intellectual home turf. When you’re relaxed and able to get the rest of the world out of the way, you can do some real thinking, try out ideas, and do it in comfort, without distractions.

The ideal option, of course, would be a hot tub where you could design websites, do your search engine optimization and be conveniently inaccessible to the world. They’re working on it.