SEO Services
What is SEO?Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic search results, making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.
SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase. Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page.
The Importance of Your Business Website to be Listed on Search Engines
Google alone has over 640,000 searches conducted every second. Every second that your website is not indexed with Google you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service. Practicing both basic and more advanced SEO techniques can drastically improve your website's ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers.
What about paid searches? Yes, you can pay to have your website listed on the search engines. However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if you don't know what you're doing. About 88% of search engine users never click on paid search ads.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines goal is to provide the user with the most relevant results possible in relation to their search query. In order for a search engine to be able to display results they need to have an archive of available information to choose from. Every search engine has a proprietary method for gathering and prioritizing website content. This process is called indexing. Search engines actually attempt to scan the entire online universe and index all the information so they can show it to you when you enter a search query.
Every search engine has what are referred to as bots, or crawlers, that constantly scan the web, indexing websites for content and following links on each webpage to other webpage's. If your website has not been indexed, it is impossible for your website to appear in the search results.
The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.
Content On Your Website: When indexing pages, the search engine bots scan each page on your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your webpage's back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
Who's Linking to you: As the search engine bots scan webpage's for indexing, they are also looking for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has. Essentially, every inbound link counts as a vote for that website's content. Also, each inbound link holds different weight. A link from a highly authoritative website will give a bigger boost than a link from a small blog site. The boost is sometimes referred to as link juice.
What it Takes To Rank
It is not difficult to get your website to index and even rank on the search engines. However, getting your website to rank for specific keywords can be tricky. There are essentially 3 elements that a search engine considers when determining where to list a website on the SERP: rank, authority, and relevance.
Rank
Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when a specific search query is entered. If you are the first website in the organic section of the SERP then your rank is 1. If your website is in the second position, your rank is 2, and so on. Your rank is an indicator of how relevant your website is in the eyes of the search engine, as it relates to the search query entered. Tracking how your website ranks for a specific keyword over time is a good way to determine if your SEO techniques are having an impact.
Authority
The search engine looks at how authoritative the websites that link to you are, what anchor text is used to link to your website, and other factors such as the age of your domain.
Relevance
Relevance is one of the most critical factors of SEO. The search engines are not only looking to see that you are using certain keywords, but they are also looking for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a specific search query.
How to Approach Your SEO Strategy
Now that we have shared a little insight into the SEO world now it's time to take a course of action. We have only scratched the surface of SEO and the importance to your business. Allow Cando Computers to help develop the strategy that will suite your needs to gain the web presence your business requires in this competitive world. Request a quote today.