Many ask, “What is SEO”?

Savvy business people know the goal of your website is to pull in customers; well, SEO is the tool to help you achieve that. It’s one of many tools, to be sure, but nonetheless it’s an important element to your strategy. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means certain keywords and geographic areas can be incorporated into the text to help you get a better ranking on the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo!.

You are basically gaining free, organic or natural search results on those major search engines as opposed to paid approaches such as pay per click. SEO ensures accuracy and consistency in your online local directory listings, which have been customized for local-specific regions, according to Entrepreneur. This is certainly an affordable way to go because there’s no outright capital involved, but it has to be done right. If you have good writers on your staff, you’ve accomplished half the battle. SEO writers are skilled in keywords usage and local SEO practices, which target a separate audience for each page on your geo site.

How it Works

Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo! all contain primary search results. This is where your web page rank shows up according to the most relevance to users at any given time. Sometimes the premise of SEO is so easy, it’s difficult! However, don’t think you’ll see immediate results. SEO is something that takes time to build and track, sometimes taking weeks and months to fully realize the end result. As a business person, you can’t afford to miss out on SEO, because your competitors are doing it and you’ll be left behind if you don’t. If you’re not always moving forward to improve and secure your position in the rankings, someone else will just move ahead of you.

There are a few ways you can optimize your positioning for SEO:

Effective Keywords

You’ll have to do some research (or hire a firm that can) to figure out your average monthly search volume for particular keywords. This research will also show you where the competition is with those same keywords, as well as the profile and popularity of links for your competitors. The right placement of those keywords is also important when it comes to domain name, title tags, meta tags, page headings, and image tags.

Killer Content

In order to get into the good graces of the search engine gods like Google, you need unique text free from errors that is well-organized, refreshing and up to date. Stale site with duped content won’t get you far. You’ll actually get penalized for doing that. Again, an SEO writer and website designer can help you become much more visible to users in all the right ways.

Links

Boosting the page ranking of your website depends on the success of your inbound and outbound links. This helps  search engines get a clue as to whether your site can be trusted. You can improve your PageRank score by linking to social media sites and networking sites such as Google+. When structuring your website, don’t overlook this integral part of the equation.

Implementing SEO into your website isn’t an overnight sensation, but it will deliver results for you if you keep diligently plugging away at it.