Search Engine Optimization – SEO

Today’s internet buzzword is Search Engine Optimization — or SEO for short. This means not only getting found on internet searches but rising to the top of those search engine results.

Who makes the rules?

The largest search engine is Google. And do you know who the second largest is? Youtube — which happens to be owned by Google! So they make most of the rules you need to follow if you want to have a successful

Search Engine Optimization campaign. On top of that, these rules keep changing as the habits of the users of the internet change. For example, it wasn’t that long ago that Google looked at a website’s desktop version to provide what we call SEO ‘juice’. Now, they look first at a site’s true mobile version! That means to get better search results, you need a real mobile site that’s not an abridged version of your desktop. That changed how websites were created and programmed.

How’s this done?

There are two ways you can accomplish SEO:

#1) Guess-Work SEO: you build your site and hope the spider/robots from search engines find your site and index its content

PROS: it doesn’t cost you anything
CONS: you need to make sure the H1 headers, meta data, keywords, meta descriptions and more are programmed onto the site and the content on each page is relevant to that information

It’s estimated that 380 new websites go live every minute — that’s over 500,000 sites every day!

That’s a lot of competition!

#2) Strategic SEO: there’s a lot that goes into building a real SEO campaign. This should include at a minimum:

Research of your competitors:
- What’s their metadata
- What key words are they using
- What meta descriptions works the best
- How do they rank
- And more
Determining the best key words for each page of your website
- This isn’t necessarily what you want to use, it’s more what your potential customers are using
Create the best meta description on each page that relates to your page’s specific keywords
If necessary, edit the content on each page to better match your meta information
Making sure the individual services you offer have its own page so they get their own SEO 'juice'
Tag all your photos and graphics
Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business page is also key to getting quick rankings in local search results and a key component of any SEO strategy

After all this is accomplished, all the pages are updated using the above information then indexed into a special database and tested. Finally, this is hand submitted to the major search engine databases.

Then to see how this worked, a report is provided 30 days later to compare where you were to where you are after your first SEO submission.

Can this be done just once?

NO. That’s the simple answer. To do this properly, you need to commit to at least 6 months.

Why? Although some sites may float up a search engine results page, you need to constantly create new content, modify existing content, look over what you did, what you need to change, make those updates and resubmit the database. This is especially true if your competition is also doing SEO.

Think of a billboard at a major intersection. If you don’t change the look, eventually those driving by won’t notice the sign, but they will if your competition puts up an ad right next to yours!