If your company is looking to increase its presence on the internet by attracting more visitors to its website, then this article is for you. We will give a brief overview of what SEO and why it is necessary.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to a series of actions that serve to improve the presence of your website in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.
So why would you want to optimize your website for search engines? Great question. So let’s answer this question with another question: why did your company start their website?
Is it for branding or for sales? Did you start a website to advertise a specific product or did you just want to help your clients reach you more easily?
How Does It Help Me?
Optimizing your website for search engines helps you achieve all these things. How? Whenever someone does a search in Google by typing in keywords, or search terms, they get a list of results.
If your website appears on the first page of these organic (naturally occurring) results, then it will get many visitors. Better search engine optimization = more visitors to your website. More visitors will then result in more success for your website, whether this is measured in sales figures or brand recognition.
Demystifying SEO
Easier said than done! Major search engines generally do not reveal the exact methods of how they rank websites and what makes up their algorithms for determining ranking.
But we do know quiet a bit about what you need to do to help your website improve its positioning in search engine results page, or SERP. Here are some of the factors that go into Google’s ranking algorithm.
- Good, quality inbound links (these are links that other websites place to your site)
- Good, quality site design and accessible structure (clean website coding, no errors, logical structure, easily accessible, internal linking etc.)
- Keywords (including relevant words in your website text and titles)
So What Do I Do?
This depends on the industry you are in to a certain extent, but here are a few general common sense tips to keep in mind.
1. When designing your website, make sure it is easily accessible and simple to navigate. Make things logical when considering the menu and navigational items. Include a sitemap: a web page that lists the content in link form of your website.
2. Start a company blog and write original articles with paragraphs of text; try and avoid point form and lists. Search engines like original and quality content. They also like current content or articles that relate to what is happening right now in your industry and the world. Try and relate your core business to a current news item in your blog posts.
3. Focus on your core business and keywords. If your business is about selling boats, then everything else that you do needs to be built on this core idea. Whether its keywords, navigation menu items, blog posts and advertising, they all need to relate to your core business.
4. Promote and socialize. This is a big topic so have a look at some of the other articles on the Sky Conferencing Blog. Use social media websites like Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about your business and website.
If you are actively writing interesting articles on your company blog, then you can submit these articles to directories and other websites to spread the word. The more interest your articles generate, the more inbound links you will receive from websites, which as we saw earlier, helps improve your website ranking in search engine results pages.
5. Do not cheat. Many professional SEO companies will promise you first page results for your website but be careful. There are many techniques that are considered by Google and others to be “black hat” which for them, is essentially cheating. JC Penney and more recently Overstock have been penalized heavily for employing black hat SEO techniques.
The bottom line: make your site interesting, easy to understand and accessible and your website ranking will naturally improve over time.
To summarize, optimizing your website for search engines makes perfect business sense and is necessary to capitalize on the immense traffic that search engines can bring. Creating a quality, informative and relevant site is the key to placing highly on search engines and gaining increased exposure for your business.
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