Why Search Engine Optimization is Important to You
Search engine optimization (or SEO, as it is better known) refers to a number of
different practices whose aim is to increase the visibility of websites both by restructuring on-site elements as well as through off-site techniques which help make it easier to find via search engines.
Why does this matter? It's much like having a business without listing your telephone number or publicizing your address. It's doubtful that any business could make it for very long if they were to do this.
The same goes for your website - if no one knows where to find you, it's unlikely you'll continue to get any traffic, if indeed you have much to begin with.
Now of course, you give your website's address in your advertising and any marketing collateral your business uses, but this isn't going to help very many people find your website unless they already know about your business.
Yes, you will reach a few people through your advertising efforts, but there is no way to know with certainty that you're reaching everyone in your target market through print or broadcast media.
However, you have a much better chance of getting the attention of people looking for the products, services or simply the content your site has to offer by making it highly relevant to the search terms which these consumers will use to find sites like yours - and that is exactly what SEO is about.
For example...
To illustrate, let me tell you about the website for a restaurant in my city. I wasn't sure what their URL was, so I simply searched for their name in Google. I found quite a few results, but none of them seemed to point to the website of the restaurant itself. For a moment, I wasn't sure if the restaurant even had a site, but I found a review which included the address of the site.
I visited the site, which was very well designed - but unfortunately, the site was built in Flash. Flash based sites may look good, but they're not search engine friendly. While it's a good idea to make your site visually appealing, it's also important to make sure that it's easy for search engines to index if you want potential customers to find it.
How do search engines find sites?
The major search engines use programs referred to as crawlers, spiders or bots which navigate from page to page, following links and adding an index of the contents to their databases.
While the specifics of this process are a proprietary trade secret which is closely guarded by the search engine companies (and are constantly being updated), this is essentially how sites are indexed by the search engines.
While not everything is known about how the search engines work, SEO experts have been able to reverse engineer enough of the process to know how it is that certain sites and pages are highly ranked for specific searches.
After a careful analysis of your website (or the website that you hope to build), we can help you to take steps which can greatly improve your chance of being found by potential visitors.
Some of these steps involve making changes to the content of the site. However, not all of these changes involve things which your visitors will actually notice when they look at your site.
So if optimizing your site to be found for relevant searches is good, then making your site more likely to come up for all kinds of searches is even better, right? Actually, not. In fact, having your site optimized for searches which are not relevant to your content can hurt your site's ranking in search results.
You've probably ended up on websites which you found through search engines whose content is entirely unrelated to what you were looking for in the first place.
This is a bit of unscrupulous search engine optimization which some unethical website owners and SEO firms do just to get visitors to the site by any means necessary. It's something which the search engines (not to mention people) see as spamming and should be avoided if you genuinely care about the future of your website.
Other Unethical SEO Practices
Other practices to steer clear of if you want avoid having your site penalized or removed from search engine indices entirely include:
automatically generated, misleading pages;
cloaking and redirects to sites which are unrelated to the original search terms;
keyword stuffing;
hidden text or links;
duplicate content on multiple pages of your site;
misspelling of well-known web sites to mislead visitors;
any other techniques which are designed to trick the search engines.
While all of these methods can bring in more traffic in the short term, they all fail in the end and in many cases, lead to your site being penalized by search engines and ignored by the visitors who are tricked into coming to your site.
Not only will these techniques not mean a sustainable increase in traffic or higher sales, they can lead to your site being banned by search engines - meaning that no one will be able to find you unless they already know your site's address.
How Does Your Site Stack Up?
Try looking up your site in one of the major search engines. What search terms would you use to find your site - is your site listed in these search results? You need to try to anticipate what keywords your visitors would use to find your site; from there, SEO is the tool which can make sure that your site ranks as highly as possible for these search terms.
If you're not using search engine optimization methods, it's like having a business with no sign or other outward indication that you're there. Your customers could be passing right by and never know you're there - and it's probably happening to you online right now.
Is
SEO important to you? You can bet on it.
Why Search Engine Optimization is Important to You
By: John S. Britsios
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