People often think that they can create a beautiful web site and be in business overnight, doing tons of business. It would be wonderful if a beautiful web site were all it takes to bring in business. But on today’s internet, with an untold number of sites, competition is fierce, and getting business to your beautiful site requires some effort.
One of the things that is critical to getting traffic to your site is search engine optimization (SEO). By now you likely have seen and heard of it, as SEO is one of the acronyms mentioned most often on the internet.
What does SEO really mean?
Search engine optimization is all about trying to get listed as high on a search engine’s search results page as you can. Think about your own internet searches – when you search for something on the internet, do you often click past the first page of offerings? Most of us don’t look past the first page; if necessary, we refine our search to bring us exactly what we want on the first page.
Reasons your business needs to learn all about how to maximize your SEO
- Even though Google recently changed their SEO rules, the techniques for optimizing your site for search engines are still just as valid.
- It is a cost effective way to market your business compared with the costs charged by social media sites, email marketers, or pay per click advertising.
- It is estimated that between 80-90% of customers go online to search out information and reviews before making a purchase. Even if you do not sell from your web site, your business needs to have its information available on the internet for prospective customers to see.
- Mobil devices are rapidly outpacing desktop units in internet searches, and this means an additional, more compact version of SEO is needed for your site.
- Your competitors are doing it, so you need to do it also to keep pace with or outpace them.
When to do SEO
SEO is not the icing on your business cake. It is one of the main ingredients. To effectively make your site visible to the search engines, you need to integrate SEO into the site as you build it. After all, you wouldn’t put the raw eggs on top of the cake after you baked it, would you?
What to do if you did not do SEO before you did your web site
What if you already have that beautiful web site that now needs SEO? A basic SEO course is the best way to learn how to integrate SEO into your web site. You can also check how your website ranks with Searchbloom’s SEO Score Tool.
Here are some tips to help you get going while you take that course:
- Search engines favor high value content.
Start a blog on your site with useful information that people can link to. Ensure that you have social media links to each article in your blog. If you do not have the time to write your blog, there are wonderful companies out there who have a team of writers who can do it for you.
- How you write the information on your page is important
Write the information on your pages as if you were talking to each customer personally. Suggestions:
- Don’t use a $5 word when a $1 word will do. If a person has to stop and look up a word you used, your message runs the risk of getting lost.
- Explain how things work. People will skip over information they do not need, but the people who need that information will be lost (and lost as customers) without it.
SEO is here to stay, despite Google’s changes. It is definitely worth the effort to optimize your web site so that you can be found by search engines and most importantly, by customers.
