What is SEO?
So....you
want your website to come up first in Yahoo! & Google search engine results? Of course
you do--it's free advertising. Ha! Einstein
said, "The things in life that
are free are often the ones that you pay
the most for."
True.
But, you
can do a few simple search engine
optimization tricks to get your pages ranked
higher in online searches right now, for
free. That's not to say it won't involve
a little time and effort. Keep reading.
Search
engine optimization (SEO) is
the process of improving the volume and
quality of traffic to a website from search
engines via natural ("organic" or "algorithmic")
search results.¹
Generating
traffic (and more traffic) to your website
is possible if your site is relevant and
reachable.
If
the search engines believe your website
has a product or service a web searcher
is seeking, then the search engines will
list your site (for free) in its organic
search results.
Organic
searches are harder to come by
because a) they're free, and as you know,
when everyone wants something for free you're
bound to run into a little competition and
b) your website needs to comply with some
basic guidelines for achieving top placement.
Paid
searches will allow you to have
more control and provide a quick way of
getting traffic to your site, but of course
the downfall is that you have to pay when
someone clicks on your ad.
How
do search engines gather information about
websites in order to determine whether a
certain site should appear given a specific
keyword?
Good
question. There are only a few search engines
used to search products and services. (mainly
Google,
Yahoo!,
and MSN)².
Basically, the search engines use special
algorithms to determine the purpose of a
website. They send out "spiders" that can read your website, as well as see
which other websites link to yours.
They look
at things like title tags, meta tags, and
alt tags in your html. They read your content.
They see how many visitors come to your
site. They also see if other websites link
to yours and determine whether these are
trustworthy sites. If your website meets
the search engine's criteria, your chances
of coming up high in the search results
will increase.
Search engine optimization
is the process of ensuring your website
meets all criteria set by search engines
so it may have the highest possible chance
of being at the top of search results.
90%
of all internet searches result in
a user clicking on one of the top
three search results.
Search
engine marketing (SEM) includes
search engine optimization, but also includes
paid inclusion and paid placement, aka Pay
Per Click advertising.
Depending
on how your website was developed (not only
how the site looks, but also the technical
aspects--html, javascript, and css, etc.)
determines whether or not the search engines
will know what keywords should trigger your
site to be placed in the organic search
results.
SEO is a
process. It is ever-changing. Search engines
change thier methods frequently in order
to provide their customers (searchers) with
the best search results possible.
SEO is not
a new concept; it's been around since the
advent of the Internet. However smaller,
local businesses have barely tapped into
this market.
In
2005 the estimated spending on local search
was only $162 million.
In
2009, it's estimated to be $3,380 million.
Don't wait
until your competition figures out how SEO
can get clicks to their website--contact
us now and we'll give you a
free estimate and site analysis.
To
sum up:
SEO will
increase web traffic and your sales revenue
without dramatically increasing costs. It
is something you can't afford to ignore
before the competition gains ground on your
business.
Fortunately,
ClicksToMySite provides affordable, quality
internet marketing to small businesses and
nonprofits.
We will also
tell you how you can integrate SEO into
your website yourself.
Look at our SEO Services and Prices to
learn how we can help you drive more traffic
to your site.
A word
about Keywords:
The content on your site and the technical
design of your site (the Meta tags, the
title pages, the URLs) all work together
in proving that your site is
relevant for a given keyword to the
search engines. If you come up with a list
of keywords and then place them strategically
on your website, the search engines can
read your site better and know what your
site is about. Therefore, when someone types
in that keyword, your site will be more
likely to appear closer to the top of the
search engine results page (SERPs). Beeware:
stuffing your website with keywords and
typing SEO Pittsburgh, SEO Pittsburgh, SEO
Pittsburgh can actually hurt your rankings,
and possibly get you banned from Google.
Not to mention it would be annoying and
useless to anyone coming to your website.
Businesses
use hundreds (sometimes thousands) of keywords
to generate traffic to their site. If your
site doesn't correctly list the keywords
for your products and services, you could
be missing out on a lot of traffic.
To check
where your website ranks organically in
Google for a given keyword, check out this
handy keyword
tool.
Learn more about search engine optimization with our SEO Tutorial, or contact us for a FREE website analysis and consultation. |
¹Source:
Wikipedia
²There
are many others, but most are "powered"
by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
