Ah, the strange and confusing world of SEO. Many fear it. Others curse it. And the majority have no idea what it is. When you set out to create a website, you may have heard of SEO. It gets thrown out a lot by digital marketing companies. But what exactly is it? How does it help your website? And why do you need it? It’s ok, you can breathe easy, we’ll help you out on this one.
Search engine optimization is a process used by web developers and marketing companies to improve the visibility of your website on search engines. For example, you take a trip over to Google in search for a pizza restaurant. So you type in “pizza places.” Google spits out a bunch of websites that match your criteria. If you notice, Google doesn’t give you just one page of names — it gives you pages upon pages of restaurants in your neck of the woods. But let’s be honest, you rarely go past page two. And because people rarely go past the second page, as a company you want your site to be on the front page of Google. And that’s when SEO comes into play.
But it’s not that simple to be on the front page. Sure you can get ahead of the pack by paying for AdWords, but that can be thousands of dollars you’re spending every month. You want to increase your ranking organically and this is a daily process. And it can be difficult, especially if you have no idea what you’re doing. Google uses a special algorithm in its rankings and if you don’t match the criteria, it will put you in one of the far pages. Although it’s best to have a professional take care of your SEO there are a couple of little things you can do to optimize your site:
- Keywords. Answer this question: If you were your customer, how would search for yourself? So if you are that pizza place, how would you find yourself online? Take a moment to sit down and write down all the keywords and phrases you would use to search for your business. Now are these words and phrases on your website pages? If not, you may need to do a little rewriting. Remember, the most important place to put your keywords are in your page headers and titles. But don’t go overboard with the keywords! The more you put in, the more search engines may think you’re a spammer and you will be ignored.
- Link to your own content. It may seem silly but it does improve traffic on your website pages.
- Make sure your URLs are clear and easy to understand. So www.randompizzaplace.com/menu makes sense to us, but not www.randompizzaplace.com/1285.html
- Keep your content as fresh as possible. You should update your content at least once a month. Search engines love fresh content. To them, it means that this is an active website.
- And of course, don’t forget to use your social media. Have a blog? Make sure you post it on social media. Created a new page? Show it off on social media.
Does this seem like a lot of work? It is. That’s why there are so many companies out there who say they can your site to the top of the list. But what you want is someone who will not only design your website but handle the SEO as well. That’s why you should contact us. We provide great legal marketing and we know what we’re doing.