Search Engine Optimization: You Can Do It!

For quite some time many of our clients have been asking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is simply doing "stuff" so your website appears early on a search results (page 1 or 2) when someone conducts a search related to what your company provides.

Unfortunately, that is about as thorough an explanation given by "providers" of SEO services. Even worse, that is the extent of the understanding of those that contract out for this service.

Here are some tips and tricks that anyone with basic website development skills can learn and do.

1) To improve your position on a search engine result, ensure your metatags, page titles and homepage text have the key (aka common) words or words that searchers will use to search for what THEY need.
Those should include the goods or services your company provides, the industry and markets your company serves, the name of your business and the location(s) served by your business. The more inclusive and specific the list, the better your position will be.

2) Another important key to getting on or close to page 1 of search results is the amount of links to your site. How do you achieve that? Blogs, social media, partner websites and cooperative linking with other sites will improve your position on search engines.

3) Update your homepage often. Web crawlers like finding new stuff. Web crawlers look through your site for key words and relevancy to searches. Thus when content is changed, it triggers newness. When you add new or change text and key words, your position greatly improves and starts move closer to the top of the list. Why? Websites with old text are thought to be inactive or abandoned. Search engines provide value if they give you useful results. So the search engine's approach is that newer stuff is better and more useful so it gets move forward on the search results list.

If you have any questions or concerns about your current website or your SEO provider, contact us.