What is SEO and Why Your Business Needs It

Why Your Business Needs SEO And What To Do About it

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what SEO is and why you need to have it for your business.

For purposes of this article, I will assume that you know nothing about SEO or what it does. If you do know, then this will be a refresher.

So SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is basically the process where you’re optimizing your website for the search engines. In other words, you want to make it so your website is found on the search engines, whenever someone searches for a keyword that relates to your business.

And when I say search engines, I mainly mean google.

Here are some search engine stats from the big 3, Google, Yahoo & Bing:

Google Sites led the explicit core search market in March with 67.5 percent of search queries conducted. Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 67.5 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 18.6 percent and Yahoo Sites with 10.1 percent. Source.

Ok so google takes up 70% of the searches. I think that value has gone up, since these stats were from a few years ago. So we need to make sure our website is optimized for google first, and the other search engines will follow.

Google Search.

Google is basically a robot that has a built in algorithm. And this algorithm decides how to RANK your website in the search engines based on how the algorithm interprets the data on your website.

This is the reason why we want to optimize our website for this algorithm and make sure we get our wesbites ranked on page 1 on google.

Ok so how do we optimize our website for SEO?

How to optimize your website for SEO

SEO is comprised mainly of 2 sections.

1. On Page SEO
2. Off Page SEO

On Page SEO

On page seo is where we focus on how the actual website is built. What I mean is, we look at things ON the page like, “title” & “descriptions” & “meta tags”. Meta tags are elements on the page like “h1, h2, h3” tags, and “alt-image” tags.

What these “on page” seo elements do is, they tell google what your site structure is all about. And this way, google’s bots will crawl your site and know exactly how to index your content from the page.

So on page seo is the first step.

Off Page SEO

The second step is “Off Page SEO”.

Off page seo mainly refers to “backlinks” or links from other site to your site. However, off page also has to do with the “engagement” of links to your site. SO for example, if you have a link from a motorcycle shop, and you sell flowers, this isn’t a good link really because it’s not relevant. Further, you want to have engagement “off page” – meaning people talking about your site in social media and other websites.

This engagement from other sites about your website, tells google that other people are “vouching” for you and recommending your site to others. Google loves this and will rank your site because of it.

So there you have it.

There is alot more detail in both knowing all there is to know for “on page” and “off page” SEO, but those are the basics when it comes to how to optimize your website for SEO.

Once you incorporate these 2 core fundamentals in wesbite development, you will then start to see the difference in the search results.