What Is SEO And Can It Help Your Small Business? (Part One)

May 26, 2015

You may have heard the term, ‘search engine optimization,’ but do you know what it means?

We’ll start to answer this question with an example. When you are looking for a new business, your search likely starts online. You go to your favorite search engine and type in exactly what you are looking for. When you hit “Enter,” you are given a list of results that match your query.

Those results did not show up on the first page by accident. There’s a good chance that there is someone behind the scenes (web designer, SEO specialist, marketer or small business owner) making sure their website shows up in the search rankings when their product or services matches what the user is looking for.

Now here’s the official definition from the search engine giant, Google:

Search engine optimization (n.): the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular site by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.

Why would someone want their site to show up on the first page or be #1 of the search results? Simply because your website has the best chance of being clicked on by a potential customer when your company is in the #1 slot.

SEO involves two halves: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the part of the strategy that you can control with elements found on your website. This process involves a mix of both art and science. The foundation of on-page SEO is keyword research or finding what search terms customers use to find your area of business. There are tools available online which track certain key terms.

Once you have found the right keywords, your next step is use them in applicable areas of your website including title tags, meta descriptions, image descriptions, headlines and copy. The key is to keep it natural. You are not trying to trick anyone (including the search engines ) you are trying to help those who are looking for the product and service that you offer.

The other half of SEO is called off-page optimization. Search engine algorithms, a significant influence on your page rankings includes the number of websites that point back to your website. These websites could be directories, blogs, social media sites or more. Each site that directs to your site acts as a vote. They say to the search engines, “This is a quality authoritative website.”

This doesn’t sound difficult, but it certainly can be. The biggest challenge is managing the sites that point back to yours. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. Unfortunately, there are a lot of non-quality, spammy websites on the internet. If a low-quality website points back to your site, it can count as a vote against you.

The process of off-page optimization involves creating a strategy that promotes good votes back to your website and limits the number of counts against your website.

Search engine optimization can be a tough strategy to master if you are new to the industry and don’t have a lot of time to learn the skill. However, when you hire an experienced professional to build a strategy for your small business, you can trust that the traffic back to your website will keep on coming.

To learn more about SEO and find out if it the expense is worth the investment, watch for the next blog post, “What is SEO and can it help your small business? (Part Two).”