Studies have shown that 95% of all Web traffic will enter a site that is returned on the first page of an Internet search. This means regardless of how great your site is if search engine optimization (SEO) techniques have not been employed to return your site on the first page of returned searches, you will miss a vast portion of potential visitors. Several components to SEO have been revamped recently to improve the quality of sites returned highest in searches. This overview will touch on some of them.
How Search Engines Work
In order to understand SEO, it is important to understand how search engines work. Web crawlers, also called bots, are programs built using algorithms that are designed to search Websites and capture the information found in them. Once the information has been captured, it is fed into a massive database and indexed according to the information contained in the site. When people perform a search, sites are returned in the results according to the relevancy of the keywords used in the search.
SEO Copywriting
The most important component of successful SEO to rank high in searches is the content contained in your Website. SEO copywriting is the practice of creating content that is easy to read, uses relevant keywords in natural language rather than repeated and “forced” into the content and appropriate titles and headers that describe the content properly.
SEO Copywriting provides the information Web crawlers store in their databases for retrieval during Web searches so it is critical the content is information rich and targets keywords relevant to the information being delivered by each page.
Keeping Content Updated and Fresh
Websites that are updated regularly with fresh, relevant content consistently rank higher in search engines than sites that are not. At one time, creating a Website and launching it was enough to rank highly in search engine returns if the site was properly built. For today’s SEO purposes, a site that is not regularly updated will seem “out of business” to Web crawlers and visitors to the site.
In order to have fresh content on a regular basis you should consider incorporating a company blog on your site, publish regular newsletters and press releases or create new pages if possible. Each new entry is an opportunity for the Web crawlers to find relevant keywords and phrases and to index your site in the search engine database.
Link Building the RIGHT Way
Building links to your site can be a very dangerous practice with the new algorithms being used by the top search engines. No longer are the hundreds of links to sites that get high volume traffic important for your search engine ranking; in fact, they can be detrimental to your ranking and have your site blacklisted.
In order to be successful with building appropriate links that will help improve your ranking, links must be relevant to the information you provide in your Website and must be sites that are reputable, not just popular by number of visits. The use of social media can be very helpful in getting your site’s links shared and populated over the Internet, which will improve your rankings.
Contact Hub & Spoke today for a free SEO audit. We’ll help you understand where you rank and how to rank higher.
