In 2013, your company most definitely utilizes the internet to gain exposure and imprint your brand on the public. Most of this visibility starts and finishes with powerhouse search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. When someone wants a product or needs information, they usually fire up the internet and simply go to one of these search engines. Due to the seeming monopolization of the web by these search engines, business leaders try and mold their online strategy around the algorithms that these engines use to prioritize search results.
Modern business leaders usually understand that search engine optimization (SEO) benefits them, but don’t know specifics. This article is meant to explain the basics of why a business benefits from SEO, and why it matters.
1. Direct access to consumer.
When someone sits down at their computer and types in a certain search query, their goal is to find a specific piece of information or product. SEO helps the search engines understand what you have to offer so that they can pair what you have with the user’s search. This is a huge reason to make sure your website is advanced SEO-wise. Just as businesses want to lure potential clients and partners to their store front or conference room, you want people to visit your website. SEO helps keep the door wide open so that you have direct access to the consumer.
Basic: You want to welcome the customer that wants to find you. SEO helps clear the water in between you and interested people across the web.
2. Usability.
Quality SEO makes your website more user-friendly. The design of your website should cater to the search engines while simultaneously providing a unique experience to the end user. When the metadataof your site provides an accurate representation of your surface content, everyone has a better experience. Search engines do not consider images or other graphics when helping decipher a page, and it’s important that your site makes sense on all levels. What you want to rank for needs to be included in your metadata, along with your visible content and links.
If your metadata is all about basketball but you have images and articles about soccer, the process is being compromised and your web presence will be diminished. Quality SEO includes making your website user friendly for both the search engines and the end user on the internet. In the end, these major search engines have the goal of making the internet more user friendly. Your part in the system is making your page an accurate representation of what you offer.
Basic: Your website needs to be user-friendly from both a search engine and user perspective. You want all parties to find your site for the right reasons. That’s the point of SEO. Having content that matches your keywords is a good place to start.
3. Keyword visibility.
SEO can help your page show up for the search queries you want it to show up for. If you want to have a web presence that helps your business, you need to know exactly what keywords you want to rank for. For instance, a cruise ship company out of Florida might want to rank for “Caribbean cruise” or “cheap Caribbean cruise”. If you were running this website, you would want to have these keywords within your content and also as the anchor text of any backlinks involving your company on the web.
It’s very difficult to rank high for keywords and it’s nearly impossible to rank for a popular one like “Caribbean cruise” without an understanding of exactly what you want to rank for. Take a look at your product or service, and focus your attention on what you would search for if you were trying to find your own site. Build your SEO strategy around those keywords and you should be rewarded with traffic and business.
Basic: Keywords are directly related to the traffic that visits your website. When people search for terms in your niche, you want to rank for the particular words they type in. Having people search for your targeted keywords, and also ranking for them, can spark a huge flow of traffic to your website and push your business over the edge.
SEO benefits your business by making your webpage more accurate. Search engine rankings are meant to make web navigation more straight forward and simple. SEO is meant to help you, the webmaster, express your products or services more accurately for the benefit of those who are interested.
Clay Christeson loves peanut butter and the World Wide Web. When he’s not scouring the internet for the latest news he writes for Local Splash, a company that provides local SEO services.
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