If you haven’t heard the phrase “SEO” you are either living under a rock or just don’t use the internet. For those of you who have undoubtedly heard it but are too embarrassed to ask the obvious question “what is SEO,” this will give you the bare minimum of something that sounds simple but is very complex. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Imagine that every time you wanted to search something on the internet you were on your own to sift through the millions of webpages. What is there was no organization? What if no one had ever set out to categorize and organize it? It definitely wouldn’t be very useful for anyone.
Thank goodness that there are companies that are built solely around doing just that, categorizing all the content on the internet to make it useful to people who need information. They have made it so that all you have to do is type in what you are looking for and up pops all the webpages that probably contain the information that you are looking for. For those of us who grew up in the olden days, it is like the Dewey decimal system on a much larger scale. So how do search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo determine what pages to match to your search? They use content to flag things such as keyword and key phrases.
Whenever you type in a word that you want to search,-the search engine goes to work finding content that matches the specific word or phrase that you use. Once a match is made and narrowed down, up comes your results. If you have ever done a search you know that the only pages that usually get any traffic are those which pop up first. Like using “A” in your name for the yellow pages, keywords are those things that will get you first on an internet search. SEO is the practice of using keywords and key phrases to get your page ranked highly on searches that pertain to your subject matter.
There are whole companies which do nothing but devise ways to get their clients webpages ranked highly on an internet search to their niche market. If you aren’t in the top ranking, your webpage will not be seen. You can have the nicest, most advanced, well thought out webpage, but if no one ever sees it what does it matter. There are many rules and specific things that you must include in the content of your webpage to direct the right flow of traffic to your site. It can be a very complex job.
The best way to determine what type of content you need to reach your niche market is to identify all the keywords that people searching for your product or service can potentially use. Once you identify them you want to use them in the content of your website. Sometimes that is not enough. There is a specific amount of times to use it and all sorts of guidelines to follow that are continually changing. Sometimes it is just best to hire the service of someone who knows what they are doing instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
