What is SEO and How will it generate quality leads for me?
SEO (short for Search Engine Optimisation) is a digital marketing activity which has empowered businesses to optimise its online presence from search engines. Gone are the days of spending your advertising budget on methods which could be hit and miss such as print advertising. One of the most successful, cost effective, and proactive marketing methods is what we now know as SEO. It is a marketing discipline that is used by many IT service companies and focuses on nurturing visibility with search engine results, driving more targeted traffic to your website.
Search engines are still relevant today because most people usually use it to solve a problem or to find information. For a search engine to remain popular and relevant, it must be able to find the right information for the user when they enter a search term. This means that they will need to recognise your unique, organic, and authoritative site content. Creating good content inevitably becomes shared with other platforms such as Twitter and blog feeds and these authority signals become noticed by Google and other search engines.
There are essentially three things to keep in mind to achieve the best SEO result:
- Produce written content which is interesting using clever words and phrases for people who are directly engaging in your market.
- Keep it simple – make it as easy as possible for people to link and share it.
- Keep it going. Content can easily become outdated if you do not continue to post and publish good informative material.
The most important point is that you have content, not just for the sake of it but that which provides quality information rather than just quantity. If you have very good content, links will be organically generated naturally, thus securing you consistent top positions on search engines.
Who are the main search engines?
The main players are Google and Bing. Google tends to be more popular due to it being more powerful and relevant but also because many people prefer using it’s web browser, Chrome. Bing has recently become relevant due to PC’s being preloaded with Explorer which has Bing as its default search engine. People across the globe, use these search engines to find you as they provide the pathway to your goods or services. If your presence is not optimised on these search engines, you will be missing out on a huge database of enquires and opportunities to drive this traffic to your site.
Another point to mention is that internet users generally do not click through a series of pages to find relevant search results, so the ranking where your site appears is crucial to direct more traffic to your site. Search engines are continually working to improve their ability to crawl deeper into web content and find the best results for users. They would typically crawl, index, process, calculate relevancy, and retrieve. They use a software calledspider and/or crawler, or in Google’s case – Googlebot, which follows links from page to page, crucially indexing content along the way.
What are the main differences between the search engines?
For Yahoo and Bing, the on-page keywords are paramount, whereas with Google, it’s largely to do with links. The platform remembers older pages far better than Yahoo! – who have no particular preference for historic sites or domains, which means it may take more time for your site to appear in Google rather than Yahoo or Bing.
Experts in SEO
SEO should be handled by experts who have a proven track record and a deep understanding of search engine algorithms to improve website rankings. They should also have the knowledge and experience of working within your industry to understand what works and what does not. Businesses around the globe create websites all the time and start with little attention to SEO, which makes it difficult for them to land in the top ranks. It is a very competitive field, and is important to not only be a top business or industry player but also be top-ranked among search engine rankings.
There are things to keep in mind while working with an SEO expert. Keywords are very important to search engines, as these are the words used when people are doing web searches. Major keywords related to your business, products or services should be mentioned on your web pages. If there are links on your web pages, ensure that these links lead to or come from reputable and relevant sites. Publishing relevant content on your site, such as blogs and articles, effectively improves your ranking with search engines.
Make sure that you work with an SEO expert who can help you register your site to the different search engines, help you identify the best keywords to use, pinpoint your target audience and make your website search engine-friendly.
Contact us now for a free SEO audit.