SEO Demystified
In order to make your website work for you, it’s imperative that you invest some time into improving your website’s ranking in the Search Engines, particularly Google. Google is the leading search engine and the fasted growing company in the history of the world. They have set the standard in search engine algorithms to determine the web page’s relevancy to its content. Because of these standards, only the quality web pages will rise to the top.
When you consider that most people don’t go beyond the first page of their online search, your goal is to be in the top 10 search results. Attaining this kind of ranking is, without a doubt, going to bring you leads, perhaps more leads than you can handle. This carrot alone should be enough to motivate you to invest some of your time into Search Engine Optimization. It makes good plain business sense.
SEO can be confusing because the rules change rapidly. You often (but not so much anymore) see websites that have been built with a focus on key word density. While this kind of strategy worked in the past, “key word stuffing” will very likely get you black-listed by Google. The most important first step to SEO is to first ascertain the most effective keywords to use on your website. There are two essential elements in determining this. One, are they relevant to your business? And two, are they actually being used by people in their searches?
Key words transform into magic words when you incorporate them into compelling content. You must write content that is relevant to your business and significant to your website visitors. To further improve traffic to your website, build upon your content by creating persuasive headlines (page titles) and magnetic meta descriptions. Your page titles and meta descriptions is the information that the searcher is going to see initially in the search engine results. The more interesting and relevant these are, the more traffic you will draw to your website.
Don’t be tempted to use subject matter that you know is searched often, but you also know is not relevant to the services you offer. You want your website to be ’sticky’, in other words you want your visitors to come to your website, stay a while and hopefully contact you. If visitors are coming to your website from Google and then immediately leaving, this behavior is tracked by Google and your ranking will fall. Including unrelated content is a poison apple; avoid it at all costs.
