Do you own a business? Have a website? Do you ever wonder why your website doesn’t rank near the very top of Google for phrases you consider important for success? Why doesn’t your website get more traffic and generate more leads? If you answered yes to these questions you need to read this series of posts and absorb the truth about SEO. Read it before building your website if you haven’t built one already, rebuilding an existing website, or contracting with any provider who offers to improve your rankings and increase your traffic.
This series of posts pulls back the curtain on SEO and reveals the many tricks unscrupulous practitioners use to sell you services that don’t work! Won’t help improve the online portion of your business and worse may sink your website to the bottom of search and end all hope you had of success online. It further endorses the practices that are legitimate. Practices that can be safely implemented today, have worked for years and will always work.
Read this series of posts before you pull the trigger on your next online marketing effort! It will make you an educated consumer of internet marketing services and save you thousands of dollars and months if not years of your website languishing on page 2 or further down in the search engine results.
Are you ready to discover your defense against being sold services that do not exist, are not provided, or will never work in the ever-changing world of what is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Let’s be clear, SEO is a legitimate service and profession practiced by many super bright individuals and organizations. SEO practitioners are essentially divided into two groups, white hat SEO specialists and black hat SEO specialists. Simply put, white hat SEO specialists will do whatever it takes that is within the search engine guidelines to make your website rank high in the search engine results pages. On the other hand, black hat SEO’s will do whatever it takes to rank your website near the top of search results. They disregard Google’s rules of the road, and while they may be able to achieve some short term success, their main claim to fame is ruining otherwise perfectly good websites and domain names by getting them penalized by Google. We really should also mention what is probably the largest group of SEO sellers, the scammers. SEO scammers prey on the lack of knowledge of the buying public and exploit this lack of knowledge to sell services that will not help, may not be delivered, and potentially can ruin their websites.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. it is the process used to improve the visibility of a website in the rankings of search engines free (organic) results. By visibility, is meant location closer to the top (higher) in the search engines’ results pages. Higher rankings essentially equal more traffic for a website.
As a practice, SEO considers how the search engines work. What are they looking for on a web page? What are the most important components of a page with respect to a search phrase? What search phrases are searchers actually looking for when they search each topic? Which are rich with traffic, and which are essentially dry holes?
The act of providing SEO service revolves around each search engine’s algorithm. An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculations, or in the case of search engines, automated reasoning. A search engine’s algorithm proceeds through a set of finite, predefined steps to reach an outcome: the search results. An SEO specialist knows the factors upon which the search engine’s algorithm works, and can therefore act to make changes to a website, so that it will appear higher in the search engine’s algorithmic output for searches relevant to the topic of the website. The goal of each search engine’s algorithm is to return the most relevant results for each given search. When the search engine succeeds in returning appropriate results high in the order returned, it has succeeded in helping the searcher easily find the result for which he is searching. Google states that their goal is to return the best possible results for their visitors: the searchers.
Why do you need to be ranked highly in search engine results?
Research has shown that 50 percent of search engine users don’t view more than one page of search engine results! And, only about 20 percent of searchers bother to look at page two of the results. Finally, less than ten percent move on to the third page of search results! What does this mean to you? If you intend to do a large portion of your new business through search engine-referred leads, you must be listed on the first page.
If searchers can’t find your website in the top ten results, featuring the search terms relevant to your business, services and products, your website won’t produce! No matter how attractive your web pages may be, your perfectly written copy won’t matter either; few will ever see it!
Truth of the matter is that many searchers don’t look past the top three results, and some only look at one search result!
Many new to the internet mistakenly assume that once their beautifully designed website is posted they can sit back and watch their internet traffic and internet sales explode. Only after months of waiting without results, do they realize that they are missing a big piece of the internet puzzle: Search Engine Optimization!
Simply put, if your website is not properly optimized, it will not generate the traffic needed to succeed!
Stay tuned next weeks post you’ll learn the differences amongst SEO practitioners.