The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

The Importance of SEO: The Basics

If you are just becoming familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it’s important to understand the basic idea of it in order to grasp how it effects your website and small business.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) can be thought of as a set of guidelines your website adheres to in order to make it more easily found organically by site visitors. This includes using tools like keywords, publishing relevant content and ensuring that your website has a consistent theme and navigable structure.

The combination of the use of all of those tools correctly results in a website that is easily found by site visitors because it can be crawled and indexed by search engine robots or bots. For example, a robot that crawls and indexes your site from Google is referred to as a Googlebot.

Robots classify and find your site through keyword association and links or back links. This is why it is important to use relevant keywords in your URL and throughout your website. After a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, it then stores that information based on relevancy and importance to the user.

If your website is both relevant and considered important, you will have a higher page rank or, more simply put, sit higher on Google’s search results page. This typically results in more organic traffic, which can translate into more sales for online businesses.

Keywords Really Do Matter

Keywords are simply the phrases you enter into your search bar when you are searching for a website or article. Some phrases are more common for specific topics and when those specific phrases are incorporated within your website, it makes your site easier to find for users and also easier for Google to classify your website. More importantly, it allows your user to know that your site has the information that she is searching for.

Trying to rank or be recognized for multiple keywords that are not related to the same topic, however, will create discord when Google is trying to classify your site and lower your page ranking. It is important to conduct thorough keyword research when creating new content or a new website so that you are found by potential customers and indexed properly by search engines.

Search Engine Optimization Gets Your Site Recognized 

What Search Engine Optimization really comes down to is optimizing your website so that it is easily recognized and classified by Google and other search engines in order to drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is what ultimately results in sales or conversions for your website and without SEO, your website may just be lost in a sea of information on the web.

For many small business owners, managing a website and a business is nearly impossible, especially if you are unfamiliar with SEO and how to apply it to your website.

Wiltwyck is a web design company that create an optimized website for your business and also help you maintain it. For more information about how we can help your business, contact us today.