Monday, April 8, 2013

The Ultimate Guide To SEO

By Michael Siders


Every modern business person knows how crucial an online business presence is. Some people mistakenly believe, however, that building a web site is all you need to do in terms of taking care of your web presence needs.

There are millions of websites on the internet; how can we make sure that people can even see your site? Online marketing is super competitive; this makes sense, seeing how crucial it is to so many people's livelihoods. One thing that many, if not all, successful websites use is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, for short.

It's hard to find a professional online retailer that doesn't use SEO. The owners of these sites know that since search engines are what most people use to find products and services, it's crucial to get found by search engines if you want traffic and customers. Furthermore, though most search engine keywords produce many hundreds or thousands of pages of results, most people only look at the first few. The goal of SEO, then, isn't just to be findable, but to show up on the first page of results.

Even if you make it to the top of the page, you can't just rest on your laurels. At all times, many other sites are trying to unseat you from that position, so to keep a high ranking you have to stay on top of your SEO and on top of your site quality and content.

So if you hire an SEO company to help your site, what can you expect them to do? One strategy that most search engine optimization companies will recommend is that you alter the content of your website in order to include a certain mix of keywords. What should those keywords be? The search engine optimization company that you hire will help you determine what they are. There is also an optimal frequency of keywords that you'll need to aim for; just stuffing your pages with keywords won't work, since search engines can tell if you're doing that just to get hits.

Another method of crawling up the search engine results page is getting your site linked to other sites. Having many other web sites link to you means that other people think you are relevant and important; and when you seem relevant and important, search engines will prioritize you above other sites. This also will likely increase your traffic, and highly trafficked sites are automatically privileged in search engine results. If you know other webmasters or business people, ask them if they'd like to trade links with you; keep in mind that this will improve both of your rankings, so you may want to avoid doing this with your competitors.




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