Search engine optimization, or SEO, is what determines the rank of your company website when it appears in internet search results. Sites that have strong SEO tend to rank higher than sites that have weak SEO, or no SEO at all.
The website’s rank determines where it appears on a results page. For example, if you do a Google search for “wombats” the first result is a Wikipedia article. The second result is the official site for a rock band called The Wombats. These two listing are ranked first, and second, respectively because of their SEO rating. Both pages have such a high rank that they beat out the National Geographic page on wombats, which was ranked third.
SEO works differently depending on your search engine. A search for “wombats” on Bing shows the same top three results, but the fourth result is different. Bing lists the Wombat Information Center fourth, while Google lists WOMBATS – Women’s Mountain Bike & Tea Society.
These differences occur due to slight differences in the way each engine searches the web, and indexes the information it finds.
So why is SEO important?
Let’s say you have a blog site with affiliate links. In order to make money, you need to drive traffic to your site so people will click your links. Or, let’s say you are using your website to advertise your own services. Without traffic, you’ll be advertising to the void.
Just creating and publishing a site does not guarantee that it will show up on the first page (or even the fifth page) of a web search. And, if it’s not on the first page, then people are not likely to see it, and you’ll get very little traffic.
How does SEO work?
There are several different ways to optimize your website for high search ranks. One method is to publish content that uses keywords that match popular web searches. For example, if you have a website devoted to dieting, then content with words like “lose weight,” “weight loss,” and “how can I trim my middle” would give you a higher ranking.
Another option is to apply tags and keywords to the site itself to make it more visible to search engines.
But SEO isn’t just about throwing popular words and phrases onto a website.
When done right, SEO-rich content and tags appear natural and seamless, yet are very effective in driving traffic to your site.
When done wrong, they look awkward and contrived, and your site could still be overlooked by major search engines.
If it sounds daunting, that’s because for many people it is.
This is why a lot of business owners rely on search engine optimization services to help them improve their rankings.
A good SEO service can take over and make your company site a lean, mean, SEO machine so you can spend your time on other aspects of your business. On a basic level, an SEO service can review your current site and offer suggestions for improving SEO. In more advanced cases they can take over designing your site, and provide SEO-boosting content and tags.
Whether you decide to tackle the task yourself, or work with a professional company, SEO is crucial to improving your presence on the web.
Article contributed by Jenna Smith
