SEO

Search Engine Optimization, also commonly referred to as (SEO) is the process of improving the ranking of your website in the various search engines.  There are over 200 factors that go into why your site ranks where it does, but for typical companies you only need to focus on 4 or 5 to get the results you are looking for since in most cases your market will not be ultra competitive.  The factors that EVERY business should be sure to pay attention to are listed below:

1st – On-site optimization.  This means having all the proper tags on your website (H1, Meta tags, Alt tags,  and rel no-follow) as well as having good content that has appropriate keyword density in regards to the search terms that you want your site to show up for.

2nd – Tracking.  It is very important to track the traffic your site is getting.  It is a great idea to opt into all the free services Google offers.  Webmaster tools, Analytics, and Google places.  Not only does this give you an idea of how your site is performing it also lets Google “data mine” your website.

3rd – links.  This is actually the most important factor in the ranking algorithm (well why did you list it 3rd then??).  I know, I know we did this for a reason however.  Properly tuning your site, and opting into all the free services you can are first because these are much more in your control.  Obtaining quality back-links is usually quite difficult, and if you start with this task first it is likely you will get burnt out and not continue with the SEO of your site and then you would miss out on all the variables that are on your site and much more easy for you to set up properly.

4th -social media.  Setup a Facebook, Twitter, and Linken profile (yes I know we left some services out, do them if you feel like it but setting up the majors ones is a good start and once you start managing these profiles I think you will see why we just pick the 2 or 3 biggest and run those as it is a time consuming process).

It is well within your power as a business owner to complete these 4 steps.  If done correctly it should only take you a couple weeks to have everything setup.  Now the most important part, don’t stop.  It will take 5 or 6 months in most cases for you to start seeing the benefits of your work in terms of more traffic to your website.  Search engines are slow, like congress they are more or less designed to not have anything happen to quickly since sites diving up and down the rankings is usually a sign of spam.  So if you start working and then stop and wait around for results you will never see any.  Just chunk out 2 -3 hours per week and dedicate it to working on the SEO of your website.  If you keep with it, you will like the results.

If you have any questions about SEO, or would like to speak with one of our SEO experts to see how we can help improve your business’s presence online you can contact us.