Maximizing your Website's Potential through
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your Internet success depends on your ability to draw the attention of potential clients. Sure, you can hand out flyers, business cards and send emails directing clients to your website, but, stopping the information campaign there would neglect a very important aspect of your marketing campaign: Search Engine Result Page ranking.
How Search Engines Work
Familiar names such as Google, Ask and Bing are, basically, programs that scan the Internet for web pages and index them, assigning weighted values based on a wide array of factors. They take into account information such as the site description and chosen keywords, which Web Developers write into the webpage.
Now, imagine, there is a potential client looking for information somewhere on the Internet. This client, who may never have come in contact with your business before, goes to a search engine to look for a company that can help better develop his or her company's website. The individual will, using keywords, request the engine to look for, “Creative Internet Solutions for Businesses”, for example. The program will then provide hundreds of pages containing thousands of resulting links to websites that are most relevant to these terms.
Your goal as a business is to rank as close as you can to the first page of results page, and not be hidden behind thousands of links to competitors who can provide for this potential client the products or services that you instead could deliver.
This task can be daunting without the aid of an expert developer, skilled in the process of SEO.
SEO
Understanding how these programs “see” your content, will help you gradually climb to the top of the list.
Many Web Developers are exceedingly savvy in this regard. Here are just some of the SEO tactics they use to get the “approval” of sites like Google, Bing or Ask.
- The content needs to be unique, not copied from elsewhere on the Internet.
- Keywords should be words someone might use when looking for the products or services your business provides. They should be used frequently, but not so frequently that the index programs think you are attempting to mislead them.
- Pages should contain 200 words at bare minimum.
- Your website should contain at least five pages.
- If possible, your domain name should include one of your primary keywords.
Getting to the top of the results page ranking does not happen overnight, but an SEO expert can work with you to increase your visibility over time. The developer should regularly test and retest your optimization regularly, tweak the content and retest. Trial and error tweaking is a tedious necessity, but, in the end, will push you closer and closer to page one.
Trustworthy Pages and Links
In addition to the time taken to perfect optimization, it will take time to gain the search engine's trust. Weight is also given to websites that stand the test of time. Adding links from older pages will also help to increase your ranking. Consider finding these potential connections should be an important a part of your overall marketing strategy as you work with your developer.
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