Businesses are always seeking growth – like we consider a business to be booming when it achieves a steady supply of customers because the more the customers we get; the more the profits we make through increased sales. We do the best we can to promote our businesses by advertising and when we have websites – we use organic and paid promotions to attract online prospects to our online brands. If you are fairly new to websites, you are going to come across the term SEO quite a lot when promoting your website so allow me to first give you a simple definition of what it means before I proceed further.
SEO is an abbreviation of the words Search Engine Optimization; when people want to search for something on the internet, they use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, et cetera. When you search for something using Google for example, Google displays results back to you based on the keywords you typed in the search box, and it further ranks these results according to the most relevant to your search. The more relevant a result, the more Google deems it to be more optimized hence the phrase Search Engine Optimization. When you search for something and your search engine of choice displays the results to you, how many of the returned results do you view on average before you decide to search using different words? Well according to research, a majority of people only view the first page of results or the second and third at most if the results seem promising. This essentially means that if your website is not optimized to be ranked within the first pages, you will likely miss out on the exposure enjoyed by the websites that are well optimized for search engines.
So how do you optimize your website for search engines? There are a couple of quick steps to get you started in the right direction such as submitting your website’s sitemap to search engines and researching on the keywords to include in your website’s content, but search engines such as Google have over time evolved to better the quality of results they display to their users – meaning it now takes more than just a clever combination of keywords to get ranked optimally. I know that might sound like bad news but in practice I view it as great news because search engines have in the past rewarded websites that cheat the system at the expense of honest sites that would have otherwise offered better value to the users.
In conclusion, it is clear that search engine systems are increasingly being geared towards ranking websites that have earned their value while ignoring websites that are all keyword and little to no value. That said, your focus should be on making your site valuable to your visitors and search engines will reward you for it.