What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is really two different things. The first step is to ensure that your website is designed and written properly so that search engines find the content highly relevant to keywords people search for. Aside from the page content itself, which certainly is the most important factor in search rank, there are "helper" pages and hidden code that only search engines see, which will increase the accuracy and ranking of your pages against search keywords. You may have heard of "META" data and "SiteMap" files...search engines look for this content to help them gauge the relevance of your website and find the content you believe is most important.

In addition to what search engines see, just as important is what people using search engines see in search results. Search engines extract certain text from your pages and display them in the search results, and this text must be written in such a way that it will encourage the user to click on the link to your website. Search engine designers are aware of the importance of this text, and it's accuracy bears heavily on where your website will appear in the search results. The "TITLE Tag" and "META Description" are nearly as important as the page content itself, and in some cases more important, because if they don't match the page content they will negatively impact your search rank!

SEO does not take place in a vacuum...your competitors may be expending as much effort as you on optimization, so optimization also involves an ongoing commitment to increasing the relevance of your website. This is the second stage of SEO, and it includes not only building your own website content, but also benchmarking your search rank for important keywords and making ongoing adjustments to individual pages. Search engines constantly tweak their internal rules for search rank, and if there's any "magic" to SEO, it's in trying to understand why your rankings change over time. You will need to use an "analytics" package to measure traffic sources coming into your website, as well as examine what visitors do when they get there.

In addition to benchmarking, a good SEO plan will include going outside your own website to build relationships with authoritative sources of content on the internet. Search engines will also take into consideration which websites people are arriving from if they click a link to your website, and this is becoming increasingly important to search rank. This measurement is problematic however, as people have been trying to abuse it for years, so each search engine has different rules for filtering out what it considers "spam" links and focusing on what it considers "quality" links.

Given this constantly shifting search-rank landscape, it's become more difficult for small and even medium-sized business to stay abreast of search engine changes and retain the talent to keep their websites optimized. But at SearchPartner.pro, this is all we do, and as your partner we will work on an ongoing basis to keep your website at the top of the search engine results page. Find out more by contacting us today!