For many websites and business owners, the term SEO can either bring about a case of the nerves or complete oblivion. For those that have no clue what SEO is or for those who are afraid to even hear those dreaded three letters, we are going to help you understand what SEO means in terms you can understand and also what it means to your business overall.
Being a business owner today usually means that you are going to have some portion of your business on the internet. Whether that is through social media presence, an ecommerce website, or a blog. Even if you have none of those thing now, at some point you will, if you want to compete in today’s marketplace. So understanding how search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing work is something that will be important to your business development and success on the internet.
Think about the internet as a big web that is all connected together through a series of links. These links are gathered through crawls of data by a search engines robot or spider. These spiders read the information, images, and words on websites and store them so when you use a search bar to look up something on the internet or on a particular website, the words you use will bring up results you want to see.
Those words you use in your search are what we call Keywords. The search engine works on relevance so it will search for sites, images, articles and more that are relevant to the keywords you use to look for the results to give you. The search engines also work on popularity, so the more popular the site, reference, article, or image is, it will assume that you would want those at the top of the list. The search engine companies then employ some math probabilities and equations to these two theories, which are known as algorithms.
Now, being a business owner you of course want to be successful, otherwise you probably would not be in business. With that theory, then it makes sense that when you develop your internet presence, you also want it to be successful. To be found easily on the internet with great results means that your site would come up when searching for particular keywords that you use in your business.
This theory is the basis of SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization.
To be able to optimize your website, images, even social media, by using links, certain words with relevant and useful information that your readers and customers want is what SEO is all about. You want the search engines to be able to read your words and images so that they can place your business into the results pages when someone is looking for something related to your expertise. Learning some tips on how to use SEO basics to your advantage is what we are going to talk about here.
There is no mystery to what SEO is. The mystery is that the search engines change their algorithms often. What that means to a business owner is that optimizing your site is always going to be a work in progress. But it is something that you can learn about and even get pretty good at too.
Now that you understand the basics, in coming articles we will be sharing tips and information to help you grow your business presence through search engine optimization and other methods to help you harness the power of the internet.