Business Owner: How Much Do You Really Know About SEO?
Much of your focus is on producing goods or services that your clients will choose over the offerings of other companies. While you must offer a quality product in order to stay in business, reaching consumers who are likely to be interested in what you sell is also important. While traditional advertising is still effective, the business owner who ignores the opportunities of online marketing and advertising is missing out. You need to understand how your online presence influences the number of people you reach. That's why it's important to understand SEO and what it can do for your business.
What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. While it's easy to find an SEO definition that is a thousand words or longer, here's one that will serve as a great starting point. SEO is the process of utilizing the elements that go into your web pages, blog posts, and even social media activity to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your blogs, social media, and website. In other words, it's what you do to attract the attention of consumers and provide them with information they can put to good use.
The purpose of SEO is to help interested parties find you online. By using approaches that are looked upon with favor by the major search engines, it's possible for your pages to place higher in search engine results. Higher placement translates into making it easier for anyone looking for what you have to offer to find your site or page easier.
How Does It Work?
There's quite a bit that goes into answering the question of what is SEO and how it works. Many people think that it has to do with choosing keywords and keyword phrases carefully. Others focus on creating content that is informative, helpful to readers, and reinforces the perception that your company has what the customer needs. Still others believe the secret is in the page descriptions and what is referred to as meta tags and meta descriptions.
The truth is that all these elements are what helps SEO to work properly.
SEO works by complying with the algorithms currently in use by the major search engines. When an Internet user wants to research a topic, find out about a product, or even see who has the best deals on something he or she wants, the user will type some type of search query into the engine. Based on the words that the user employs, the search engine will scour the untold billions of pages on the Internet, identify the ones that are directly relevant to the query, and return them in order of relevance. The result is that the user gets to see links to pages that are highly likely to be of help.
For example, consider a consumer who wants to find out if there are any sales for televisions nearby. Entering a search phrase like "electronic sales in xxxx" with "xxxx" being the city where the individual lives, is likely to return results for sales by retailers nearby. Further down in the results will be local electronics retailers who may or may not be having a sale. In the best-case scenario, the user will quickly identify a couple of places to look for the perfect television.
Why Does It Matter?
Search engine optimization matters because more and more people are turning to the Internet when it comes to shopping, researching news topics, or finding ideas for managing projects. With so many places to look for information online, attempting to sift through all the pages without some sort of help would take more time than most people are willing to devote. SEO helps to bring order to the task and allow people to find what they want faster and easier.
The importance of SEO has always been a part of search engine function. Even in the earliest days of the World Wide Web, finding information based on entering a keyword or a phrase helped rank results that were considered more relevant. The search engines of today use increasingly sophisticated algorithms to qualify data and return the best possible results.
Why does that matter to you? Understanding SEO and it's role in ranking search results allows you to know what must be done to ensure your website, blog pages, and landing pages are deemed worthy of being placed higher in the search engine results. Higher placement means more people are likely to visit your pages, like what they see, and decide to do business with you.
Has SEO Evolved?
The process of SEO is constantly being refined and enhanced. This is necessary to safeguard against the use of methods that attempt to rig search engine results and cause less than satisfactory content to place higher than relevant content. You can use this ongoing evolution to your benefit by staying on top of what search engines want and making sure every page on your site and blog comply.
Can I Manage SEO on My Own?
You may have heard that it's possible to learn how to do SEO by taking a course or watching a few tutorials. In truth, you can learn quite a bit about SEO and even pick up a few tips. While that's great, those approaches will not help you utilize search engine optimization to its fullest potential.
SEO is not something you can consider as a side-line. All by itself, it can be a full-time endeavor. Your real expertise lies in the area of operating the company efficiently and producing products that are of the best quality. Can you honestly say that you can continue to give those areas the attention they deserve and still manage your SEO? For the majority of business owners, the answer is no.
If you are serious about using SEO to strengthen your online presence and generate more and better traffic to your site, it pays to seek support from a professional who understands SEO on more than a basic level. Professionals in this field know how to spot trends on how the major search engines are refining their algorithms, can anticipate what is coming next, and help you understand how to make whatever changes are necessary to keep your company in front of consumers who could use what you offer.