Search Engine Optimization for Your Website
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important things you should do for a website after building it. SEO gets your website found by your target market by getting your website on page one of the search engines.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing the footprint of your web presence in the major search engines, to ultimately drive more traffic to your website.
A search engine is a website that scours the web, indexing the content of sites it encounters, then serving up search results for that content. Major search engines include Google (the undisputed world champion), Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo. There are hundreds of other search engines out there, but the big three are the most important to engage.
How Do Search Engines Work?
Search engines must determine how to respond to search requests in a logical manner. Google tries to maintain an air of secrecy around their page ranking efforts, but a little experimentation (and following all the “gurus” on the internet) can give us some clues. Bing, on the other hand, actually publishes the three most important factors in ranking pages:
- Content quality as measured by user behavior
- Social references to a page
- Links to a page
Bing monitors how users react to the pages listed in its search results page. For example, they monitor what percentage of users continue to click through a website beyond the initial page they visited from the search engine link. If searchers return immediately to the search engine results page (called “bounce") Bing assumes the site didn’t match the expectations of the searcher. Pages that have high bounce rates are assumed to not match the search terms the searcher originally used, causing the site to move down in the rankings.
Bing also monitors how much a site is referenced on social network sites (like Facebook and Twitter).
Finally, Bing is interested in the anchor text of words linked from other websites to a particular page. Specific keywords used in a hyperlink should match the content presented on the target page. For example, the search phrase "Video Surveillance" would be a great anchor text link to Unified Technology Solutions video surveillance page, if used in a page discussing video surveillance or security systems.
Search engine optimization is the process of discovering the proper keywords (or key phrases) that searchers for your product may use, then working to build relevant, authoritative backlinks to your site.
What is the SEO process?
The process of optimizing a website to attract more traffic through the search engines involves five steps:
- Keyword research: determine the keywords, or key phrases (also called “long-tail keywords") that searchers will use to find your business.
- Site Planning: Structuring a website’s content to match the target keywords.
- Creating Quality Content: Write high-quality copy that is relevant and useful for the searcher, content that will keep them engaged and cause them to stick around the website for awhile.
- Building quality links: Work to get inbound links from other websites, especially links with target keywords in the anchor text.
- Tracking Results: Like an airliner, small adjustments must be made frequently to maximize results and stay on track. Tracking involves using an analytics program installed on the web server to reveal patterns in visitors’ behavior, then making improvements or adjustments in the site content.
If you need great SEO results now for your website without the steep learning curve, contact us.