How SEO Works – A Simple Primer

More and more businesses are turning to search engine optimization, or SEO to bring traffic and revenue to their bottom line. It’s a very targeted form of traffic. This is because prospects are actively searching for what the business has to offer. That means they are usually in a buying mode when searching, and they should be considered warm, if not hot, leads when they come to the site. Because of this, SEO is a form of marketing that every business should consider. But, many do not understand how it works.

The first step  is keyword research. Without proper keyword research, the campaign is doomed from the beginning. Keyword research is nothing more than sitting down and getting into the mind of the customer. Just sit down and come up with 10 to 20 words and phrases your customers would type into a search engine to find what you have to offer.

Once you have your initial set of keywords, you can plug them into various tools to find thousands of other possibilities. You can even get data like competition and search volume. The plum keywords are the ones that have little competition, but lots of volume. This means it will take less effort to rank on a phrase that could bring in good traffic rather quickly.

The next phase of SEO is creating a website with content that is related to those phrases. This could be called on-page optimization. If you already have a website, then you mainly need to be concerned with content creation only.

When a search engine spider visits your site and crawls the content, it reads the pages and forms a decision as to the theme of the site. Then when someone makes a query to the search engine, it can return your site if it is related to the query.

The other part of SEO is off-page optimization. This primarily deals with the external factors that influence the ranking of the website. This largely deals with link building.

When a spider crawls other websites that link back to your site, they think of that as a vote for your website’s popularity. The more links your site has, the more popular the spider considers it to be.

So, the process of link building caught on, and people found ways to game the system. Search engines, like Google, caught onto this and came up with ways to combat this.

Link building is still important, but there are certain ways to do it to keep under the radar and to do it legitimately. There is certain art to link building. One of the best ways is to write simply stellar content that people want to link to in the first place.

SEO is crucial for businesses today in this competitive landscape. It used to be an afterthought, but today it is imperative. But, it has to be done the right way. If you try to abuse it you can risk banishment from the search engines and never be able to realize the power of SEO.

Even though search engines are only a couple of decades old, they have totally changed the way that we obtain knowledge. Instead of going to the library and searching through a paper list of sources, and then going back to the stacks to find appropriate books that fit the subject being searched for, people could now get on the internet and type in the subject for which they were looking and instantly get all of the information needed.

This provided instant facts, and overnight the whole world of research changed. And in the advertising world the dynamic changed immediately as well. Instead of stumbling upon an ad that gave us an inspiration of what we thought we might need, we could now become very proactive and pinpoint what we wanted, and the databases of the internet found them for us in an instant.

Now people got tricky and began to game the system. Since the number one thing that people were looking for was sex and porn, enterprising website designers used subliminal lettering the same color as the color of the website background and programmed in “sex” and other pornographic terms all over the page.

The words were not visible to the viewer on the computer screen, but the algorithm from the search engine saw them and brought those sites up to the top of the list. It did not take long however until the search engines caught on and put in a few rules of their own.

Now the rules were going to get much tougher to the point that people were going to have to build their websites legitimately so that people would start getting information that they were looking for. If a search was initiated for woodworking supplies, the search was only going to find those sites that gave good content about the subject being searched for. If you need help we have a Miami FL SEO company that can help you with your search engine optimization.

Soon the science of keywords and keyword positioning began to have importance where if you had the keyword sprinkled in the content of your web page, your ranking would be enhanced. After all, that is what people are searching for so if you plant it they will find it, and thus find your website as well.

Soon a company named Google, of all names, began to dominate the rule-making as they were getting the lion’s share of searches. As people began to catch on and game the algorithms, the mathematical equations that determined who got found the quickest, Google changed the algorithms. Google wanted to reward the websites who branded their company names and provided valuable content about their subject, because again, that was what people wanted.

Today, Google is still in charge, and content searching is more alive than ever, and the world has instant everything, as whatever we wish to find, we just “Google it.” Here the company name has become a verb as we can locate anything in as many forms as Google wants to show us. This is certainly not our Father’s Internet today.