What is Search Engine Optimization and How Does it Work?
There are literally HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of websites in the world today. So, how in the world do you get your website found amongst all the other competing informational and commercial sites?
The answer is the practice of search engine optimization (SEO). By implementing a wide variety of specific strategies tools and general industry practices, your site can utilize SEO to climb the rankings of Google and the other search engines to receive a consistent flow of organic (free) traffic. 90% of people who search for a term will click on links that appear in the first page of the search engine results. Chances are if you are not on the first page then your competitors are, meaning they get new customers regularly, without having to lift a finger.
So, in a nutshell SEO is the efforts made to place a website at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) within the organic results section.
Site Visitors and Search Engines
Search engine users always type in specific phrases when conducting a search. These visitors are looking for highly targeted consumers who are ready to buy what your company offers. Unfortunately, SEO can be a very complicated practice that is as much of an art as it is a science.
While it is easy to learn the basics of search engine optimization, it takes a company who is constantly following the ever-changing search industry in order to dominate your competitors. SEO is the most cost effective internet marketing strategy for the long run. After the initial optimization work is completed there is far less expense needed to keep your site ranked at the top of the results.
Search engines are constantly scanning the web, reviewing all of the hundreds of millions of websites every single day. Search engines collect their data by sending out an army of virtual, web-crawling "spiders". (It is not as creepy as it sounds.) In order to decide website rank the search engines actually use a bunch of fancy math, called algorithms. It helps them to choose the best website results to display for any given keyword phrase entered by a search engine user.
Google and the other search engines only display the most relevant websites based on criteria they feel is important. Unless your website is fully optimized, the search engines select one of your competitors websites for the top of the ranks rather than yours.
Website Optimization (On Site) – The search engines analyze your website based on how well it was made (for search engines) as well as by the content posted on your website. This is where we handle the technical part of search engine optimization. That includes all of the “meta data” of your website and the contextual content that appears on your company’s webpages. There are at least a dozen details about any website that can be improved to attract the search engines and show them that your website is the most relevant. These items include not only the text that you can see on your webpages, but also the metadata and code of your website that you cannot see. There are many small and important details to consider. You will want to make sure your website contains the most important keyword phrases in the right places.
Inbound Links (Off Site) - When it comes to SEO, even more important than your website are the links that come in to your website from other sites across the web. These inbound links need to come from a variety of relevant sources to show the search engines that your website is important. You can think of links almost as votes that your site should appear at the top of the search engine result pages. It is important to note that not all links are created equal. A good SEO campaign employs a wide variety of links, but also gets links from websites that Google deems important. In Google language, you want links from sites with high "Page Rank".
Since both the on page and off page optimization is based around search phrases, the SEO process begins with identifying the ideal keyword phrases to targeted for your business. Pro SEO has developed a proprietary system for identifying the absolute best search keyword phrases for your business, and how to implement those keywords across the web to benefit your website the most.
We start by taking into consideration how relevant the term is to your business, how often the term is searched for and the level of competition already competing for the term on the search engines.
Local SEO
Local SEO is more specific than normal SEO and uses practices that tend to benefit local businesses more so than national sites. For the most part the SEO is exactly the same, but with Local SEO extra steps are taken to help the smaller "local" business succeed within the search engines. At Pro SEO we pride ourselves in helping out the little guy. Our local SEO packages work so well we have regularly beaten national chains for top results within local markets.
What does this mean for you as a small business? This means that even as a small business you can beat out the big chains and get the customers they otherwise would have gotten. You can read more here about our Local SEO service.
White Hat SEO Vs. Black Hat SEO
You may hear these two terms when people talk about SEO. These terms are actually quite important and can be the difference between a good long term SEO strategy and a horrible long term SEO strategy.
White hat SEO is the use of proper "good" SEO practices to boost your rankings within the search engines. It employs techniques that are not trying to deceive the search engines into ranking a website higher than it should be ranked.
On the other hand black hat SEO is exactly the opposite. Black hat SEO employs techniques aimed at tricking and deceiving the search engines. While this may work quite well for the short term and you may see an initial boost to your website rankings within the search engines more often than not the search engines catch on to the trickery. If they do catch on not only will you lose your newly attained ranking, but most of the time your website will be penalized as well, and sometimes even blacklisted from the search engines all together. This is never good, and usually requires the purchase of a new domain, and thus you are forced to start all over again.
Pro SEO only employs white hat techniques so the long term benefits you reap from the SEO work done are never put into jeopardy.
