If you are a small business owner I am sure you have heard the phrase, "we can help increase your SEO, to drive more business for you!"
Still wondering what SEO even means?
Let the Razor Team help.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Having a strong SEO strategy and implementing it is vital to your small business because of the ability it gives your business in a highly competitive market to found more often than your competitors.
What is Considered in SEO?
Understanding SEO can be confusing. Let's break it down into three big parts.
Organic Results - Ad's generally make up a large portion of Search Engine Results Pages. So organic traffic is any traffic that you do not have to pay for through ads.
Quality Traffic - You want to attract visitors to your website to buy the products you sell. If people come to your site because Google is telling them that you are a car detailer but in reality your in the landscaping business that would not be considered quality traffic. The visitors are going to bounce right off your page.
Quantity Traffic - Once your quality of traffic is clear and you are showing correctly on the Search Engine Results Pages, the more traffic you can get the better of you will be.
How SEO Works?
First, it is important to recognize what a search engine is. When you think of a search engine, think Google. Google is not the only search engine but it is the most well known. Other Search Engines would include Yahoo and Bing.
When using one of these Search Engines you typically type a question into a box and thousands of results are then generated trying to answer your question.
Pretty awesome right?
Have you ever considered how that all works? Who gets to be at the top? Why do they get to be at the top?
Here's How:
Google has a crawler that gathers information from across the web and collects an extraordinary amount of information and content. The crawlers than bring that information back to Google and builds an index. The information in the index is then fed through the Google algorithm to best match the best possible answers to your question. In a matter of seconds, you receive an amazing amount of information.
Here is a great graphic from MOZ about the main factors in ranking in Google
Tips in Optimizing Your Site to Rank Higher in Search Engines
Boosting Your Site with Frequent, Updated Content
Major search engines like Google have very sensitive algorithms that love fresh, updated content. Having a blog that you can update your website with monthly, weekly, or even daily is a way to send waves to these search engines that your website is being updated frequently and gives it the content it needs to index. This can greatly impact your Google ranking.
In almost all cases this is an extremely budget-friendly way of creating content that can provide a search engine boost for your business.
Blogs can also increase your SEO standing as it provides an opportunity to utilize crucial keywords that consumers typically search for relating to your specific service or product.
Metadata
When designing your website, each page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert metadata, or information about the contents of your page. If you have a CMS site originally produced by the UMC web team will have pre-populated this data for you. However, it is important for you to review and update Metadata as your site changes over time.
Highly Functioning Website
Poor website structure and information architecture can doom even the best SEO campaigns. If your website is difficult for users to navigate and Google to crawl, your rankings are likely to suffer.
Things like site speed, alt tags, image sizes, and browser caching are all apart of Googles algorithm. Audit your site often to make sure these parts of your site are optimized. A slow site will lower your Google rankings greatly.
Work on the Links
Both internal and external links continue to have a huge influence on how your website ranks. Fix Broken Links! Many website owners have a habit of ignoring broken links. This can create a less than ideal user experience. Again, audit your site often so you can easily spot the 404 errors and fix them. Check out another blog article about 301 redirects on your site.
Razor Thin Media is Here to Help
SEO is just like dating. You are looking for someone who appeals to your preferences and needs, while at the same time, you are trying to be appealing to others with your looks, personality and charisma. This is the type of relationship Google has with your website. Google is looking for sites that appeal to the algorithm according to a specific set of standards. And the websites are trying to do their best in terms of looks and content to appeal to Google. There will be a checklist that websites need to tick off before Google is willing to take that relationship to the next level. That checklist is SEO.
If you are a business owner that needs help with your company looks, no one can help you get ready for the "dating" scene like Razor Thin Media.
Contact us today by giving us a call at 928.978.5077 or visiting our website at www.razorthinmedia.com/contact