By Isaac Taylor, PowerSites Jr. Product Manager
What is SEO?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process of optimizing websites for inclusion in organic, or non-paid, search engine listings. It is essential to familiarize yourself with SEO because this is what will open up the gates to the wonderful world of increased revenue streams.
Why is SEO important for my business?
The purpose of a business website is to attract potential customers searching for the products and/or services that you offer; but if you step back and look at the World Wide Web from a grand perspective you’ll see that it’s literally a “web” of billions upon billions of websites which is growing bigger every day.
Most websites link to only a few similar sites, so if you consider navigating this “web” of sites from the perspective of a single user who’s logged into the internet from their home computer, you quickly realize that this one person couldn’t possibly have a clue about how to find what they’re looking for without some expert help to guide them.
Search engines are those experts, driving users to the content they want.
Search engines are essentially groups of high-powered computers that continuously crawl through the web like spiders; they’re always looking for new websites or changes to existing sites that they can add to their indexes.
As these very powerful computers add the sites they find to their index, they’re also analyzing each site’s content to determine what it is about. Search engines will then rank each site for keywords that the search engines believe relevant to the content of the sites. It’s this indexing and ranking process that website owners hope to influence via SEO work.
As you may have already discovered, not every business owner who creates a website is able to clearly communicate what products and/or services they provide. This often leaves search engines scratching their proverbial heads when they try to index websites that claim to be about one thing but have the content of something completely different.
An example of this would be a website that’s labeled as a plumbing site, but all of the content on the site is about digging trenches and clearing out roots. The plumber may be really good at lying down drainage lines, but in their excitement to share the details of how they prep the ground for their work, they completely forgot to mention anything about the plumbing process itself.
To combat the problem of site content not matching its site labels, search engines have provided ‘website creation best practices’ which I will cover in more detail in a later post.
SEO is important to your business because with proper implementation your site will appear in front of more potential customers who are searching for the products and/or services that you provide.
