The Importance of Using Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is a method used to push your webpage higher up on the search results and increase traffic for your website. How can we do this? First we need to understand how the search engine works through the billions of webpages on the entire internet. Lets use a search engine called Google. You may have heard of it. Personally, it's my favorite.

Google starts off by crawling. The crawling process is done by Google's spiders. "Spiders crawling on the web" (Haha get it?) Spiders start by crawling to the many webpages with your search words included and then crawl from link to link until it has created an index of results to choose from. When you enter words into Google, the machines search the index of results finding the most relevant page to you based on the number and quality of links to that page. The rule of thumb is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites. Google's bots do this within a matter of milliseconds. The lag of even 2-3 seconds can create dissatisfaction so the search engine needs to provide answers as fast as possible. If I didn't explain it well enough for you, maybe our friend Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google can.

Best Practices for SEO Marketing

• Create a useful and informative content. Make sure they accurately describe your content.
• Create a site with relative links: make sure the <title> and ALT is descriptive and accurate of your webpage.
• Make sure your page is user friendly. Create it for the users, not the search engine. Do not deceive users by cloaking (presenting different content to search engines than you display to users)

And don't forget..

Link Building

Building a relative and accurate link is important. If the webpage reads out "cats" somewhere in it but only talks about blenders, that page will be ruled out of Google's optimization formulas. Your link should be keyword rich. Try to think of what people are typing into the search bar when they are looking for your site. Google counts how many times the keyword is used on your site. Make sure your keywords are in text form because Google will not recognize it as a term and instead recognize it as an image. That flaw could lower your chances at being #1.

Here is a breakdown of a link provided by Moz's guide to link building:

1. Start of Link Tag: tells search engines that a link to something else will follow
2. Link referral location: Takes you to different sections of the page that you're already on
3. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the text the user sees on the page that they will need to click to be taken to this specific link
4. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link to the search engine

How can link building help your business?

Link building is critical because, as I mentioned before , the spiders of Google crawl from link to link to find the best results. The ranking of your page is determined by two factors.

1. The number of people visiting your page
2. How many other webpages have links to your page.

The higher the quality websites linking to your page, the higher you are going to rank in the search results. One of the most important factors in link building is Domain strength. Domain Strength tells us the cumulative value of an entire domain. It is the instead of looking at the entire page, Google looks at the strength of the domain to determine where on the totem pole this page belongs. For example, if a page is linked to ESPN, that page is probably credible and has good content because ESPN in a reliable source. You can also link build through bloggers by asking them to use your page in their blogs.

Making connections with your website to other webpages is crucial to drive traffic and more conversions to your business. So get out there and make connections!