Sunday, November 23, 2008
by Charlee Jacobs
People throw around the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” without really knowing what it means or how it fits their business.
Simply defined by Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is “the process of improving volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.
Now what does that mean? Search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Google etc offer information at our fingertips, all we have to do is tell them what we are looking for. Your goal is to get more people to the pages of your website that provide the information they are looking for. The closer your website is to the first page of the results they return, the better chance you have of being found online when someone is searching for what you offer.
Optimizing your site is the process taken to improve your positioning without using paid advertising. There are a handful of things that you can do on your own without having to pay someone an arm and a leg to do for you. Here are a few:
• Making sure your site is “visible” or “crawl-able” by the search engine spiders that determine page rank.
• Being clear on your search term strategy. What search terms are you expecting your website visitors to search on?
• Choosing page titles, meta-tags, meta-descriptions and keywords that are relevant to your business and relevant to the content on the page.
• Adding fresh content to your site regularly, continually giving the robots “fresh reading material.”
• Establishing inbound links relevant to your site’s content.
Now understanding all of the ins and outs of SEO is much more complicated than that but there are some very basic things that can be done to help with your positioning.
Real Pro Systems knows how important optimizing your web site is. We have built our sites on a search engine friendly architecture, provided built-in tools to set your page titles, meta-descriptions and key words, provided an integrated Blog, and provide initial site optimization at no extra charge!
