Do you have a business website? Have you had stellar results with it or are traffic and sales hard to come by? If it’s the latter, you may be suffering from poor interfacing with the search engines such as Google and others. You may need to optimize your website for search engines.
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What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the sum of all improvements for the optimization of the content appearing on websites. SEO is critical for your website so that it will be properly crawled by search engines such as Google.
If your site finds cyber favor after being crawled by the search engines, your pages will appear at or near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s how you will get found online! SEO is the main tool to deliver targeted and organic traffic to your site at the highest rate possible. Without effective SEO, your website will be effectively invisible.
Do You Know How To Optimize Your Site for Search Engines?
Many people attempt to construct an SEO-friendly site by themselves. Few can do this well. Most, however, will produce a sub-par site that will remain unseen in the cyber world.
SEO Expertise: Why You Need It
Building a site that will rank highly on the SERPs is a function of two things: pleasing both your audience as well as the ever-changing search engine algorithms. You can do it yourself or partner with an SEO-savvy firm to ensure the highest successful outcome. Here are some of the components of excellent SEO:
- Your Target Audience. Knowing your target audience is the first critical step in crafting a site that will be highly visible in the cyber world. Let’s use an example to get this point across. Imagine you are building a site for the buying and selling of rare U.S postage stamps.
Most collectors of rare stamps are relatively wealthy, male, and in the 35- to 70-year-old range. Imagine what a turn-off it would be for them to come to your site only to find it filled with jargon known only by the Gen X crowd?
- Keyword Research and Usage. At the heart of good SEO practice is the research and implementation of effective keywords. When your site is being crawled, certain words or phrases will be picked up and noted by the search engines. When you design your site, you’ll want to be strategic about such text. You’ll not only want to focus on your main keyword, but also long-tail keywords, related keywords, and local keywords.
- Content Types. A common misconception is to think that only text will be analyzed by the engines. Not true. Google and the other search engines look at all content that appears on a site. The following will be crawled, analyzed, and evaluated as content by Google: Text, images, lists, video, and infographics to name a few.
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