Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of making your website easy for Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and others to find.
For example, when a person living in New York City uses Google to locate a website design company in New York, they will likely type “website design New York” into Google’s search field.
The top results that come up first, under “sponsored links,” will be paid links. This means that people have paid for this placement through a program called Pay-Per-Click advertising.
The results immediately following these paid links still enjoy the same prime real estate space—without having to pay the ad costs. How did they get that level of ranking without paying for it? The answer is SEO. They knew how to make the most of their websites’ SEO potential. And with this article, you’ll develop some understanding of how you can, too.
By using SEO techniques properly throughout your site, you can achieve higher search engine rankings for the keywords that you optimize for.
When you search for a term in a search engine, like “website design New York,” the search engines want to provide you with the very best and most relevant websites for your inquiry. It’s important to understand how search engines work in order to understand SEO.
And the first thing you should know is that search engines prepare ahead of time for your keyword search. Here’s how:
· Crawling: Search engines have already used programs called “spiders” to automatically “crawl” the web. The spiders have made their way around the web and its files to get an idea of where and what things are. The spiders crawl websites on an ongoing basis.
· Indexing: After a website and its pages have been “crawled,” the search engines put these pages into categories (called indexes)—so that they are easier to find later. This is one of the reasons why ongoing SEO is important—because each time they crawl, if your website has been updated with fresh content it will be re-indexed.
When you do a keyword search in a search engine, here’s what happens:
· Let’s say you type “website design New York” into a search engine.
· The search engine checks its index and finds all the websites that match your request.
· Then, the search engine uses an algorithm (mathematical sorting equation) to determine which of these documents is the most relevant to your query of “website design New York.”
· The search engine displays your results.
· Therefore, the websites that were optimized for the search term “website design New York” are far more likely to show up in these results than those websites that haven’t been optimized. This is where SEO can do wonders for your business. If you have properly optimized your website, then your site is more likely to show up every time someone searches for keywords that are related to your business. This will ultimately increase the traffic, and leads to your site.
Why is ongoing SEO important?
The major search engines change their algorithms frequently, so staying on top of your SEO is an ongoing process. Each of these algorithms places different amounts of importance on things like keyword density, meta tags, links, indexes, and unique content. What works today may not work tomorrow, so ongoing SEO efforts are essential to gain rankings, and keep them.
In closing, search engine optimization is all about making your site visible to the search engines for the keyword searches that are most related to your business. SEO is not advertising. The idea behind SEO is to increase your search engine ranking because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay. Because of this, SEO is often referred to as “organic” or “natural” placement.
The other thing about SEO is that unlike paid Pay-Per-Click advertising, it doesn’t guarantee first page placement. However, when done properly, it can significantly increase your chances. As a matter of fact, any website that doesn’t take advantage of some basic SEO is doing itself a disservice, and missing out on viable traffic.
