Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves the visibility of your website or web page in standard search engine results. Improving SEO on your website includes everything from your website copy to the way other sites link to you on the web. Ultimately though SEO isn’t just about building search engine-friendly websites, it’s about making your site better for people.

“Search experience optimization” is what SEO should really stand for!”

Leads are the ultimate goal of every business. But you have to start with getting traffic. And not just any traffic, good traffic. Being found on the internet requires more than a great looking website. You need a website that can be found based on the services and products your customers are looking for! You must make sure you target the customer first. Then you target the search engines.

Online Business Listings with Google My Business

You do have to make sure that the search engines can find you! They must understand who you are, what you do, and why people should be visiting you. This means clean concise keywords and content to support it. Doing this properly requires a broad inbound marketing effort. SEO is also still very important and that is divided in to into two categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-Page versus Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO focuses on making your web pages easy to read by providing the right keywords, supporting content, sitemap and layout using tags. Off-page SEO is focused on establishing authority and credibility from other websites to confirm you are who you say you are and that you are worth trusting. Both work together to improve the ranking and visibility of your website.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO involves optimizing your page layout, coding, and ratios (text-to-code ratio, keyword-to-text ratio, etc.) in such a way that your business website pages are get found easily by the search engine bots. Some quick tips:

• Write relevant content that is interesting and useful to your target audience
• Use Header Tags to create headings, sub-headings, and organize your content
• Incorporate target keywords in to your content but keep them relevant
• Content length is important. Focus on drilling down on your topic.
• Simplify reading for your users with lists, bullets, and featured elements
• Don’t forget images! Label and caption them appropriately

When you’ve pulled together great content and optimized it properly, you can move on to off-page SEO techniques to establish credibility through third-party connections.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO involves getting that content you just created out on the web for your target prospects to see. While on-page SEO is important, off-page SEO is one of the most effective ways to generate more search traffic to your website. Each link-back to your website validates you and your content with an even bigger impact on your rankings. This is normally done through combined efforts of blogging, social media campaigns, email marketing campaigns, press releases, etc. It’s a collective effort that allows you add ‘breadth’ as well as ‘depth’ to your website.

There is no lack of content available on the web today and customers are inundated with options. You have to get the right message to them at the right time and create value, so above all else, focus on providing useful content that does a great job of covering topics your target audience is interested in. Organize it so it’s easy for users to scan quickly and for search engines to get a clear picture of what you are saying. In the end you win if they win!