You've heard the letters "SEO," and everyone seems to think you need it. But what is it?
If you are a regular internet user, you no doubt have used one of the major search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo) to find a product, service or topic of interest to you. To search, you enter keywords into the search field, which generally results in pages and pages of links that will bring you to relevant websites.
The lucky companies that appear in the first several pages of the search engine's results are more likely to get your attention—and thus, your business. As you can see, it is valuable to be positioned among the first pages of results.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of bringing your site to the attention of search engines, with the goal of progressively boosting your position in search results. We say "art" because there is no simple trick to make sure search engines recognize your site. Rather, there are a series of techniques that skilled SEO consultants use to make your displayed content as well as your back-end coding more readable and relevant to search engines.
Robots: Make Them Your Friends
The internet search engine process is not run by people, it is run by robots called spiders, web crawlers, worms, and web ants. These software robots are dispatched throughout the internet by search engines to visit the vast number of sites and try to understand and index them. If your site is not indexed, it will not show up in search engine results. Period.
A site with good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques attracts robots and provides instructions, descriptions, and content that robots can understand, analyze, and later recall in response to a search. A site with no or poor SEO will either get ignored, or worse – tagged as spam or blacklisted.
What Your Site Is Saying to Robots
If you needed to hire a new manager for your office, you would let people know about the opening by advertising. An ad would include the positions’ title, job description, and how to contact you. It might also state how not to contact you (i.e., no phone calls). Your web site's meta data (coded information that is not part of the design) and other content provide similar information to robots, including titles, descriptions, and instructions on how and what to read on a web page. A robot uses the data to find your site, analyze it, and decide what to do with it (ignore it, ban it, or index it for later searching).
"WebDugout offers Long Island's most effective Search Engine Optimization service hands down." —Sun-Cor Air Cargo
How Web Design, SEO & Analytics All Come Together
WebDugout's Web Design team can create an optimal site that makes it easy for search engine "crawlers" to interpret your data. Then, our professional search engine optimization (SEO) consultants will employ a series of techniques to ensure search engines can understand and index your data, with the goal of progressively boosting your position in search results. Our internet marketing team can help you analyze your improving traffic data with Analytics.
So think of SEO as advertising your site to search engines. If robots do not know about your site, find relevance in coded data and content, or cannot interpret your message, you will not get search engine “air time.”
What's All That Traffic?
Once you have optimized your site for search engines, you'll want to analyze the new traffic coming to your site using Analytics. Site Analytics is different and a lot more efficient than a site counter. A site counter only tells you how many hits you receive on your site. But what if you want to know how many of those hits were from local customers? Or if they visited your newest page? Or how long they stayed on your site?
Analytics can provide you with this important information!
Call WebDugout's Long Island headquarters in Deer Park, New York, for information on adding regular SEO services to your website. Start driving more potential customers to your site today!
