What is this SEO Thing Anyway??
November 18th, 2013 by
SEO is not a shortened nickname for CeeLo Green. It’s not a secret government agency either. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of improving a website’s visibility by making its function clear to Google and other search engines. Whether you realize it or not, SEO is a big part of every search you make online.
To understand why you need SEO, you need to understand what SEO is. Search engines like Google and Bing use magical mathematical formulas—also known as algorithms—to scour the Internet and provide websites that are relevant to user searches. Each search engine considers a number of factors before deciding which website gets ranked where and who ultimately ends up on the first page of your search results:
Content
Good content is the key to a high-performing website. Make sure your site’s content properly reflects your business and features the products and services you offer. Optimizing your content for relevant search terms will make sure you’re showing up for the right users. Think about it—you don’t want to rank on the results page for “ponies” if you sell motorcycles (unless you are selling Iron Pony Motorcycles, that is). Plus, having good content keeps your bounce rate down and increases the amount of time users spend on your site, which are both good things in Google’s eyes. Search engines also look to see if your content is fresh and up-to-date. So if you want to stay at the top of the charts, keep fresh with the times, yo.
Metadata
Located somewhere in all that code that may or may not closely resemble the Matrix is metadata that tells search engines exactly what your website is there for. One important piece of metadata is the title tag. Each individual page has a title tag, and it’s one of the first tags the search engine looks at. There’s also a meta description, which you might recognize as the sentence or two listed under a website’s name on the search engine results page. Properly optimizing this data will help search engines understand what your site is about.
Authority
Links are important. Having other sites link to your page proves your site is authoritative enough that other people are willing to reference it as a source. It’s kind of like in high school when you had a crush on Tim because all the girls talked about how amazing his cover of “Don’t Stop Believing” was and that song was totally your jam. But just like in high school, the trustworthy information has to come from the cool kids or else no one will believe it. In our case, “the cool kids” are the websites that Google already trusts. In other words, links aren’t worth much if they’re from sites that Google hasn’t heard of.
And if you need a little help getting a hang of this SEO thing, you can always count on the experts to give you a hand. Give Search Influence a call today to get started.
Good beginner’s points for explaining what SEO is and how it helps. We’ve have many similar discussions, giving crash-courses in SEO/SEM to our clients. Making any kind of parallels to their specific industry is always a good starting point.