Written by Pat Norton, Director of Business Development at Active Web Group. Posted on April 25th, 2011
Pat Norton is the Director of Business Development with Active Web Group
What is SEO? SEO is a an abbreviation of the term search engine optimization. Perhaps the most important marketing element for acquiring new customers and making sure existing customers find you is based on where your website shows up on the search engines. Billions of searches are done each day for products and services and 80% of all business comes from the first five organic rankings. A website is optimized by a professional so that it shows up high in the rankings for terms that best fit the website’s offerings. The simplest explanation is that good SEO helps you get good rankings and that is very good for business. More than half of all buying decisions are influenced by research done on the web. Not being ranked well will most likely lead to an eventual loss of over half your business. These figures are only going to get more extreme in time.
SEO is primarily made up of three elements. Site architecture, inbound links, and content are the three cornerstones of SEO. Site architecture refers to how the site is built. What type of code was used. Is it an HTML site or a site that using programming and a database to create dynamic pages. Either type of site can be effectively optimized, but they must first be created using the best and cleanest development and programming standards. When a site is built correctly, the search spider can find every page on your website. This gives each page a ranking opportunity. Too often I see sites that have many categories or parts of the site that are not accessed by the search engines and left out. This is common for some of the biggest software providers and designers or developers who may be very good at making a site work well or look good, but are not prepared to deal with the extensive marketing challenges of making the website code search engine friendly. The navigation, inter-site linking, site maps and more are all a part of the site architecture. The architecture of a site may require ongoing upgrades and changes to meet the demands of rapidly changing search spiders.
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Inbound links are links on domains other than your own that point to your website. Inbound links are like votes from other sites. The more you get the more likely you are to have better search engine rankings. Inbound links should point to many of your different pages and not just your home page. It is also important that links are obtained in a way that meets with guidelines that are set forth by the search engines. The search engines do not want website owners buying links for rankings purposes. This might be considered black hat seo techniques and get your website into trouble. Trouble means lost rankings. Inbound links can be acquired in many ways. You can publish on other peoples websites or blogs. Other people can write about your site and link to you. Other people many point to some interesting content or a product you have with a link. You can buy links on directories that advertise your services for sale. You can create tools or downloads that people want to point to or have. Inbound link value is a function of the relevance of the content on the site from which the link comes and the power or page rank of the site from which it comes.
Content is a very important part of SEO. The search engines like original and recent content. A constant expansion of content that is attractive to users and is the first to be published. For quite a time it was ok to use free content that was often duplicated many times. That no longer has much if any value. Even once sacred product data taken directly from manufacturers is now looked at valueless for rankings. Rule of thumb is, if is not original, it has no SEO value. That is not to say that content from other sources does not belong on your web site. Just don’t rely on it for rankings. A simple test for anyone to perform is to do a few searches for some of your favorite products or services. Not see how many pages the websites are listed in the top five spots. Very few are under one hundred pages and most are over one thousand! It is also important that the content is good. Poor content will not be viewed much and users will leave the pages quickly. This all factors into your ranking positions. Images and videos are an important part of content and can be used to help your rankings as well. They must be used correctly and in balance with the total content used. Content is the area that most amateurs get hurt. It is often assumed that if you just write a lot of copy with enough keyword stuffing your content element is satisfied. If it were that simple there wouldn’t be thousands of professional services writing content and thousands more search engine optimization professionals fixing it!
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What is SEO? That seems like a simple question. The best answer to what is SEO is this. SEO is how to grow your business by enabling your website to be found. Without it, chances of survival are remote.
