These methods include both on-site elements (such as changing the content itself and other elements of your site) and off-site efforts, all with the goal of making the site more visible to web users. The key is to make the site more relevant to what users are looking for, which appeals to visitors and search engines alike.
Why is it important to optimize your site for the search engines? Think of it this way. Would you try to run a business without listing your number or address in your local phone directory? Not for long, most likely.
When your customers don't know where you are, then it's not going to be easy to get new business - and the odds are that you probably don't have a lot to begin with if you're not letting consumers know how to find you.
Naturally, you already list the URL of your website in any of your print advertisements as well as on your business cards and any other materials which current and potential customers are likely to see.
While your ads and marketing materials will undoubtedly reach some new customers, there's no way of knowing that your ads are reaching all of the people that you want them to.
By comparison, it's a lot easier to get visitors to your site by using SEO to make it more visible to people searching for words which are relevant to your content.
For example...
Just to show you how important search engine optimization is, consider what happened to me recently when I was trying to find a restaurant near my home. I wasn't sure what the address of the site was, so I just Googled the name of the restaurant.
There were plenty of results, but as far as I could tell, none of these links were to the restaurant's site. Finally, I found a review which mentioned the site's URL.
So why did I have such a hard time finding the site? As it turns out, the restaurant's site was created as a Flash animation; not a good format if you want your site to be search engine friendly. Search engines can't see Flash content, so if you build your site this way, you shouldn't be surprised if it doesn't get indexed.
Search engines use software (known as robots, crawlers or spiders) which make their way around the World Wide Web, traveling from link to link and indexing the content of the pages they find and adding them to a database.
The particulars of how exactly each search engine indexes and ranks web pages is a proprietary matter, but SEO experts have managed to learn enough about the process to know how some sites end up more highly ranked than others.
By analyzing your site and its content, we can help you figure out the next step to make your site more easily found by web users through making changes to your content and other elements, some of which are things which are visible to visitors, others of which are not.
One mistake which many people make is to assume that it's best to rank for as many different keywords as possible, whether these are relevant to their site or not. This is something which happens both due to people being unaware of how SEO works and through the work of ethically-challenged search engine optimization firms.
No matter how it happens, it means running the risk of having your site penalized by the search engines or banned by them entirely. If you care about your site, avoid this and other unethical SEO methods such as:
- automatically generated, misleading doorway pages;
- cloaked links and redirecting;
- keyword stuffing;
- hidden text or links;
- duplicate content on multiple pages of your site;
- misspelling the names of well-known web sites to mislead potential visitors;
- any other methods designed to trick search engines.
These kinds of tricks work to bring in a higher number of visitors for a while, but will all end up having the opposite effect in the end. If you trick visitors into coming to your site, they're not going to stay long; and it's a near certainty that they're not going to be buying anything from you.
Worse still is that the search engines will eventually catch on and de-index your site - which means that no one will be able to find it.
How Does Your Site Rank In Search Results?
Have you ever looked up your site in one of the major search engines? If not, go ahead and do it right now; we'll wait. What kind of keywords are your customers using to find your site?
One of the essentials of search engine optimization is to figure out which keywords will get the best results for your site - and from that basis, SEO is about how to use them to get more visitors there by ranking well for these keywords.
Failing to use SEO to promote your website is like trying to run your business without having a sign or listing your phone number in your local yellow pages. Otherwise, you're losing out on business every day as potential buyers simply pass by. Does SEO matter to your business? You can bet your future on it.