Since you found our site, I’m sure you know how important search engine optimization (SEO) is as a source of traffic that can be converted to sales. But what is SEO? SEO is sometimes called natural or organic search. SEO requires making changes to your web site that prove its authority and relevance to search engines like Google Yahoo and Bing. The purpose of SEO is to get your site ranked well for search terms related to your business and increase the number of customers that click through search results to land on your site.
How Does SEO Help Your Site?
SEO is a combination of content, technology and authority. These three factors working together can boost your site to the top of the rankings, or at least higher.
Unique and relevant content is possibly the single most important factor of your”on page” SEO – optimized content is the use of phrases and words (keywords) within paragraphs and pages of text that relate to terms people actually use when they’re “Googling” something. Search engines use their index of your site ot match it up with the terms people search for. When the content on your page is similar or related to a term that someone searches on, search engines are likely (more likely anyway) to boost your page in the results for the related search term or phrase (sometimes referred to as long-tail search).
The base technology of SEO is getting your site indexed – Being indexed (listed) is the minimum requirement of ranking. A search engine has to be able to find and crawl (read) your site to understand what it’s about, the content it contains and ultimately rank your site in search results. If your site isn’t indexed it can’t be ranked.
Crawling your site or spidering it involved search engines jumping form site to site and recording content, images, etc to understand what the site is about. Search Engines can read through your site’s code and record its textual content. Then it will follow any links on that page to another page and do the same.
In this day of do-it-yourself websites, most sites are not optimized and some don’t even allow search engine spiders to read their site or index their content. There are dozens of settings form your code to the server your site is hosted on that may prevent search engines form even knowing your site exists. In most cases, site owners aren’t even aware that those indexing roadblocks are hurting them. Search Engine Optimization helps to resolve those issues and open the doors, helping the indexing process that leads to listings, visits, and ultimately sales.
We use several tools to determine what people are actually searching for – this is called keyword research. Once we understand what keywords to incorporate into your content, we need to make sure the rest of the content makes sense and is useful to someone who might find it. The minimum element of any content is it needs to be 100% unique. If you copy content from other sites you will get penalized.
Being an authority on your topic will help lift your site to the top – If your site is linked form other sites including local and industry directories, it gives Google a better idea of your authority or knowledge of your business. ultimately that makes Google more likely to deem your content worthy and show it to searchers. As search engines crawl your site, they keep track of the links to your site and mentions of your company and analyzes all the data ultimately leading to your rankings for a particular topic.
SEO is the only long term affordable solution to helping your site’s rankings, visitors and ultimately sales. For more information or a free website analysis, call an Garland SEO Consultant anytime at 214-506-3471