There’s a lot of talk on social media and among other marketing professionals about Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it’s often referred. To many of us it’s just another “buzzword” and it’s not uncommon for people eyes to glaze over at the start of this kind of conversation. What does it really mean? Why is everyone talking about it? Is it really that important? These may be some of the burning questions that you have, and I hope to be able to answer them and that your eyes won’t glaze over as you read this :)
Everyone wants their site to rank #1 in the major search engines. Who wouldn’t want to show up at the top of that list? In order to get there, it’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight, and anyone that tells you it can, is flat out lying to you! That process to improve your search engine ranking is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There’s a lot of things for the search engine to consider when it displays its results, and we’ll cover them all, just not all of them today, I promise :)
The search engines have their own rules for how they rank the results that are shown to you. No one knows what the exact rules are, but we do have a pretty good idea of how they work to get the results that we’re looking for. It’s all about returning results that are relevant to you.
How do search engines like Google know what’s relevant to you? Google is smart, but they rely on some basic information to deliver the results you’re looking for (we’ll get to that later). You can search for a brand name say “Clicks & Mortar Websites”. You would expect to see our website show up at the top of the list because that’s most relevant to what you’re looking for. If you search “mobile friendly website Detroit” which relates to one of the areas we specialize in, our site is near the top and you’ll notice some other results mixed in as well. Sparing you the details (for now), the results you see are probably because the pages mention the word or phrase you’ve searched and probably has a lot of links on other sites that point back to that page. To a search engine, having content that relates to a specific word or phrase and other websites having links to that page tells it that there must be something relevant there if other sites are linking to it too.
At Clicks & Mortar Websites, we’re here to help our fellow small businesses and entrepreneurs. We offer affordable SEO plans with the mobile friendly websites we build. If you have questions, feel free to shoot me an email [email protected] or give us a call, 248-690-6559 today.
Josh is owner and lead developer at Clicks & Mortar Websites. He's an expert in designing and developing websites and loves helping other entreprenuers create a great first impression online. Learn more about working with Josh and his team here.