What is Search Engine Optimization?

 

What is Search Engine Optimization?

 4/25/2014 12:00:00 AM | Views: 6,875 | 3 Minutes, 47 Second |  Written By John Marx | Tags: SEO

There are easy and hard ways to answer questions. Today we are going to answer "What is Search Engine Optimization?" It seems to always be attached directly or indirectly to "Why do I need it?" or "Why does it cost so much?"

What it is

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the simple activity of making the information on your website can be found (findable by the Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) for the words and phrases relevant to the content of your website. SEO is a business process that all businesses need and is hard to understand. SEO is about more than just bolding, underlining or italicizing text. Pages need proper headings and sub-headings to pages, content that is not only readable by a person without seeming like "spam" but written in a way that is also well understood by computer algorithms.

Why you need it

A good SEO company will never guarantee results and one that says they can you need to run from! We can’t say that enough. The exception is unless they are Google and say they can guarantee you a position on Google then there is no way to guarantee a position. When you venture into the realm of SEO what an SEO company does, or yourself if you opt to do the work yourself, is to modify your website in a way that you rank well. Unless you pay money for your phrases you won’t be in positions 1, 2 or 3 as these are paid spots. The spots we always shoot for is positions 1, 2, and 3 of what is called "organic search". Organic search is where you don’t pay Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Rather you put good, high-quality, content on your site in a manner that is formatted according to the latest search engine standards.

Why it costs and how it pays

The cost is due to there being a lot of labor to achieve your goals. To keep this simple we will outline the basics for a typical small to mid-size business website. As more pages, updates, and changes are done on a site the amount of time increases which leads to higher costs. Any good SEO plan will do at a minimum the following for you.

  1. Survey. Every project that we start with it is to gain an understanding of not only your business but also your goals, ambitions for your site, current and past marketing plans, who your competitors are, and what you feel would result in a successful SEO campaign.
  2. Expectations. We find many times that the expectations are misinformed either because of past dealings with SEO companies or expecting a miracle cure for their website woes. We always work with our customers to communicate and make certain that we all have realistic objectives and goals to gauge the success of the SEO campaign.
  3. Evaluate. Listing the items the current site is doing correctly and the items that are not helping your site achieve the desired results.
  4. Recommend. Going into an SEO campaign we know that something isn’t right or you wouldn’t be looking to improve your search engine rankings. The recommendation stage is critical as this is where we truly start working together in formulating an online marketing campaign to make your business succeed based on the previous items we’ve talked about.

A lot of the "magic" of SEO happens where most people don’t see. Many sites we’ve taken over do have good content. It can be improved upon with a great copywriter which will help achieve the results that you are wanting. The behind the scene magic though is what is truly the holy grail of SEO. You have page titles, descriptions that the search engines use, keyword phrases (not one or two words but phrases you’d type into the search engines), and tags that tie into social media.

Conclusion

In keeping with keeping things simple the one item we ask of all of our customers is to "ask questions". Don’t stay quiet and then wonder why things aren’t working. When we establish a business relationship we love to communicate with you as it lets us know what your expectations are and allows us to give you information that you can understand for a true online marketing success story.

If you would like a free consultation, or better yet to start the process now we would love to talk with you about your online marketing needs. Give us a call (855) 456-2669 or email us here at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@.