Search engine optimization (SEO) is the most effective way to drive traffic to your website. When consumers search for products, services or information on the Internet, Google, Yahoo or whatever search engine they use sifts through millions of websites in its data base looking for the best matches to the query. It ranks those matches according to its particular standards and algorithms and shoots them back to the consumer. While the search engine may produce thousands, even millions, of matches, only about 10 to 12 at a time are displayed on the consumer’s view screen. Most consumers will check out matches on the first page provided and a few will click to view page 2 or page 3. Beyond that, your website might as well not exist. Search engine optimization is like putting bright, blinking neon lights around your website. It tells search engines: “Here I am! Choose me!”
By targeting search engines and the techniques they use to match consumer queries to websites, SEO effectively increases the visibility of your website on the Internet highway, increasing website traffic and bringing more potential consumers to your door.
“The typical website gets 61% of its traffic from organic (nonpaid) search engine results, and 41% of all traffic from Google alone,” Christopher Null wrote in a recent posting to PC World’s Business Center blog, “Ensuring that the company’s site ranks highly in search results is, for most businesses, a make-or-break proposition.”
Optimizing your website to consistently gain the attention of Internet search engines requires a multi-dimensional approach that specifically targets your preferred customer base. The goal of SEO is to place your website as close to the top of the results list as possible when a consumer initiates a search related to your business/industry and the products and services you offer. It’s not a job for amateurs. Search engines are constantly changing the way they rank pages to keep up with new developments in computer algorithms, spam avoidance and technology. Web pages need to be re-optimized monthly to keep up and maintain their high rankings.
You can’t count on search engines to simply “find” you. Web pages must be manually submitted to search engines in strict accordance with highly technical guidelines developed and constantly revised to eliminate spam. Experienced SEO firms have also found that it’s not good to put all your eggs in one basket, so they also submit web pages to major directories. Directories are human-edited lists of websites that are also indexed by search engines and included in their query response data banks. Placing your website in major directories increases your opportunity to be cataloged by search engines and discovered by consumers.
On Friday: Specific SEO techniques that improve search engine rankings.
