April 12 2012

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization but what does that really mean? When a web designer/developer tells you that they offer SEO, they are telling you that they will do whatever they have to do in order to get your website to pop up when a prospective customer searches for your product or service. There are entire companies that specialize in nothing but SEO – it is a huge topic.

If you haven’t made any effort to improve your “findability” on the internet you may never have any visitors to your site. Being easy to find is extremely important but there is massive competition for those first few pages of a Google search so you need to make a bit of an effort.

The first consideration is the name of your website.  If there is some clue as to what you are promoting in the name you are one step ahead of the game.

Next you will need to do some research for “keywords“. What will people type into their search boxes to try to find you? Start with the obvious and search yourself, then get creative and try to think like your customers might think – all possibilities. Write these down. You will be inserting these into the “meta-data” on your WebPages.

Then you need to think of a short but descriptive sentence to describe each page of your website. These sentences will appear on the search list and encourage visitors to your site so make them interesting and to the point. These also go into the “meta-data” section of your webpage. It is also helpful to name each page in a descriptive way because it will appear at the top when a visitor tabs through your site so they will know where they are and what to expect on the page.

In addition to all this you will need to consider things like the keywords when deciding on what text/copy you have. You will also have to keep SEO in mind when choosing Headings for different sections and Labels for images. It all helps and some people have made a science out of it.

Another major way to improve your standings is to have a lot of other people and websites linking to you. It improves traffic if you link out as well. Ultimately, the more times someone goes to your website, the higher it will rise on the pages until it is near the top. The trick is to make this happen pro-actively instead of waiting (and hoping) that it will happen all by its self – because it probably won’t.

You can always be found by someone who has your URL (for example http://www.sandstoneweb.ca) but it is more desirable for them to be able to type in a couple of general words about your product or service and find you that way.

Please understand that this is a very simple outline of the entire process just to give you a bit of understanding of what is involved. The details of how to accomplish top standing day after day, on a search engine like Google, would take months to discuss. What you need to know is that SEO is valuable and very important to your online business success.