SEO is a method of improving your website’s standing with the search engines. It is a natural method and is free to do unless you want to pay someone to do it for you. It’s not like PPC campaigns (pay-per-click).
Today around 97% of all consumers take advantage of the convenience of the Internet for finding products and services. Your brand’s visibility will be greatly affected by your SEO efforts.
The goal is to end up on page one of the search results for the keywords and terms that are relevant to your site. Most people aim for the Google search engine. Google gets about 95% of all clicks for any search terms on page one. As far as SEO goes the number one spot will receive 40% of all clicks in total. What is interesting is that people believe that using PPC can net them the same kind of results. Google says that natural searches receive as much as 8 times as many clicks as any paid advertising. Search engine optimization costs you nothing to do. It is a natural way of improving your site’s visibility.
Another big part of SEO work is obtaining backlinks. These are links pointing back to your site from other websites. They are viewed by the search engines as ‘votes’ for your site. The more votes the more popular you will become with the search engines. Sites with a higher authority or ‘page rank’ will carry a lot more weight than those of a lower rank. Sites that end in .edu or .gov will often times carry more link juice and are good for linking to.
After you have a good start for your SEO work and have obtained a few links then you need to create good, fresh, unique, and relevant content. Now you can diversify your linking by making forum posts, social media, and gaining even more links back to your pages.
Google really likes it when your links grow naturally and over time. If they come all at once, like when you buy them, then they really frown on that. Google is known to perform an act called ‘sandboxing’ where websites engage in their SEO practices inappropriately. The hard part is that Google does not let you know exactly what is right and what is wrong. They also change their rules regularly.
After you are established you can ramp up your efforts. In the first 90 days you can add links weekly. A good method is to build 10 in your first week, 15 in your next week, and 20 the next week.
Another wise move is to build links to each individual page of your site. Many people link only to their home pages. Google smiles on ‘healthy sites’ that have multiple pages with links pointing to them.
If you own a business either online or downtown, a good way of building links easily is swapping with vendors and customers. Ask them to link with your site and then you link back the their pages. This can be an easy way of adding links that Google will approve of.
This is how SEO works and can really boost your business, and that is for an online business or a local business downtown.