SEO is a major topic, even those who are brand new to the web development process have usually encountered the term or have come in contact with someone trying to sell them some sort of SEO service.
Why is SEO so important? The reason is simple, they provide an almost limitless source of organic traffic, organic meaning everyone that finds your website through a search engine is searching for the exact service you offer. As a business owner this translates to an incredible amount of leads and sales.
As of 2015, over 3.2 billion people use the internet world wide, Over 95% of these users utilize search engines to find content and websites. Again, this translates to is an overwhelming amount of potential customers looking at your product or service, that is – if you are able to rank.
So what exactly is Search engine optimization and how does it work? We’ll address both of these questions and cover some basic SEO knowledge you should have as web master.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO, or search engine optimization is the process of developing and constructing a website with specific elements to please search engines. In other words, you’re presenting search engines with what they want to see on in order to gain more favorable rankings.
This entails building websites that are easily deciphered by search engines. Using appropriate titles tag, labeling images the correctly, and showing strong engagement signals are common ways to optimize for search engines.
Show search engines what they want to see and in return they will rank your website higher in their results – the goal is simple, though simple does not always equate to easy. The question then becomes, what do search engines want to see in a website, and how to you prove website engagement?
What makes a website SEO Friendly?
To really address this questions we have to understand two things. Google and all other search engines are businesses, not only so but they are in competition with each other. Their goal is to provide their users with the most relevant search results.
Each algorithmic update made to search engines is made to ensure that the most relevant results are displayed. It’s a listing of relevancy, usefulness, popularity and convenience. For this cause, search engine will not rank just any website. If they did it would reflect poorly on them.
A website that ranks in the number one position must be relevant, informative, helpful, and very popular. All of these things translate into one thing: Great Content.
Great Content
I always encourage My Website Created clients to to publish more content, especially because we don’t place page limits on your website – do publish more content.
It establishes the website as an authority. Not only so but the more content a website publishes the higher it ranks for it’s main keyword, and for many other long tailed keywords. I’ll explain with an example scenario.
A client of ours owns a restaurant in D.C, we’ve built them a website to rank for “Italian restaurant Washington DC.” This client began utilizing their built in blog and posted a few articles, one article entitled “the most inexpensive places in Washington DC to buy fresh cherry tomatoes” They did a search in Google some time later for the exact search term “the most inexpensive places in Washington DC to buy fresh cherry tomatoes” and discovered that their article was ranked #1. In excitement they searched all their other articles by title and found most of them listed in the #1 position.
- The main keyword: “italian resturant washington DC” is a lot more competitive to rank for. You have at least several other restaurants competing to rank for the same search terms. You’ll need to prove your website worth to rank for such a term.
- “the most inexpensive places in Washington DC to buy the fresh cherry tomatoes” is what we would consider as a long tail keyword, the reason for it is that it’s a lot more specific, meaning competition is almost nonexistent, but again there’s very little traffic for that keyword. Ranking for is a lot easier, yet admittedly you will not gain much traffic nor make many sales solely by ranking for one long tail keyword.
Yet by ranking for multiple long term keywords traffic begins compiling, Search engines place more importance on your website and rankings increase, which also increases traffic.
Number one positions for easy keywords provides leverage to rank for more competitive keywords.
The point is this: As a small business owner, use your website to educate your clients and inform your prospects. Do it as a means to automate business interactions.
As a tutor, you may have many clients asking for book recommendation, we’ll – turn it into a blog post and direct clients to the page when the topic arises. Your automating business operations while producing content to be picked up by search engines. The more content you have greater authority your website builds, which in turn results in higher rankings.
Rather than creating a page with a list of services you offer, dedicate a page to each main service. You’ll be better for it in the end as you’ll notice that each page begins standing on its own and pulls in traffic for it’s targeted keywords.
There’s a whole lot to the SEO topic. This is SEO 101, so we’ll stop here. Create content that is relevant, informative, and helpful. Once you’ve done that promote your content on social medial platforms (doing so to prove popularity). As a business owner that’s you have to do in terms of SEO, produce content and share it on your social media platform.