What is SEO?

Your roof is leaking.  Short of learning how to re-roof your home by yourself, you have no choice but to hire a contractor or roofing expert.  Seems pretty straightforward.   You sit down at your computer, fire up a search engine  and type in a search for a local roofing company.  Up pops a multitude of choices with phone numbers, maps and even testimonials.  Voila! You have just found yourself a solution to that leaky roof.  Believe it or not the company that you eventual hire just benefited from SEO.  What is SEO and how can it impact your business?  Let’s take a look at the key component to a successful SEO marketing campaign and how things have changed in this area in just the last decade. 

In short, SEO means Search Engine Optimization.  This long technical phrase makes reference to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic(meaning not paid for)  search results, thus making your website more visible and easier to find for people who are looking for your brand, product, or service via search engines like the big three: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

When building a website, therefore it is important to please not just your visitors but also the search engines measuring your website for key elements.  Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links to name a few. Here is a quick look at what search engines are looking for and how thee requirements have changed even just within the last decade.

• Keywords – Optimizing for keywords on your page is not just about putting the top search words for your field all over your content.  SEO’s recognize keyword stuffing when they see it and it can hurt rather than help your ranking.  Instead, the goal is not to just use keywords but also have great content and an overall theme that the search engines can recognize.  In addition, use relevant titles, descriptions, and content.
• Links – Search engines want to see that that there are links to and from authoritative sites instead of links that were purchased.  Link building to known directories is an excellent place to start.
• Social Media – One of the biggest changes in the last decade is the way social media plays into SEO. Search engines now take into account tweets, retweets, Google+ authorship, blogging, and social interactions.
• User Experience – Search engines are also analyzing what your site looks like, how easy it is to navigate and how secure it looks.  It is no longer just important for users t o find your website but to interact with it and stay on the website for longer periods. If it is too hard to navigate with too many ads and a high bounce rate it will be ranked lower that the competition who keeps visitors reading content and clicking through the pages.

Make it your business practice to employ these tactics when trying to maximize your SEO.  By keeping these in mind and ultimately the needs of your targeted audience, you will find that you will rank higher with search engines.

Categorised in: Blog, Marketing