SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, how do you make Google work for you. Anyone who's ever used a search engine understand the concept: the results on the top of the first page are the ones you click on. So how do you get there? Honestly, it's better to just hire a SEO certified professional, or a marketing team to handle it for you. But here are some tips to get you started.
1. Keywords - Figure out what sort of words people use to search for your product, and include as many of them as you can in your website. This is often done on a coding level, where the website itself is designed to make it as easy as possible for search engine indexing to find it.
2. Cross Linking - The more times people click through to and around your site, the higher it climbs in the search engine rankings. One strategy is to have, essentially, sets of links, where the main page takes you to a second page which takes you to the content you're looking for, to have links to other pages on the most important pages. There are ways to do this organically, without disrupting or annoying the user, such as linking to a page with services, then having the user click on each individual service to see examples of it.And/or, when organically mentioning another service in the description of your current one, linking straight to that service in the text.
3. Inbound and Outbound Linking - Advertise your website. have links to your website on your social media sites, on your blog, and links to your blog on your website. The more places that your blog or website shows up, the more it will be scene, and more importantly, the more it will be trafficked. One of the things search engine crawlers, the things that find and rate the sites, look for is how often your site gets mentioned on other sites.
4. Data and Analytics - Once you start getting traffic, you need to track that traffic. Search engine algorithms change all the time. Make sure that you know who's visiting your site, when, where and how, so you know how to change your website and your SEO tactics to match your demographic. Most companies that provide SEO help or expertise include analytics and tracking as part of the package, as it's hard to optimize something when you don't know h0w it's performing in the first place.
5. Sponsored Links - If doing SEO the organic way just isn't producing the results you want, you can always pay the search engine to get featured at the top of the results. Whether or not this is actually effect is up in the air. Many people, myself include, specifically avoid the sponsored links because we assume that their not actually the best results. Search engine user like to think that the reason an article or a business is at the top of the list is because it's the most popular, and most relevant result. Sponsored links bypass that, and as silly as it sounds, feels like the company is blatantly "cheating" to improve their standing.
These tips can get you started, but as you've probably figured out, SEO is best left to professionals. Luckily, there are a lot out there (including my company, UnimarPR). Just try to focus on companies that provide "organic" SEO optimization over sponsored links or pay per click, as search engine companies prefer websites and businesses that game the system naturally.
How important do you think SEO is to a business? If
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