This is part one in a series of articles in which we discuss the reasons why every small business should be worried about SEO and the best way to start addressing and improving organic search ranking without breaking the bank.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
SEO is the process of making changes to a website to increase your unpaid search rank on various search engines like Google. In layman’s terms, SEO is making your website appear higher on Google when someone searches for keywords that relate to your site.
The point of optimizing your pages for search engines is to make it easier for more people to find your website without paying for ads. If you manage to do this effectively, you will increase the amount of organic traffic to your website and in turn increase your revenues.
SEO can be challenging but you do not have to be a professional to get started, in most cases a large part of the work can be managed internally. One of the most important things to remember is this is not going to be a sprint, more like a never ending marathon. As search engines change and evolve over time, your website will have to reflect those changes to stay competitive.
Over this small series of articles, we are going to talk specifically about how you can get started with SEO and increase your unpaid traffic for free and then move on to some more advanced practices.
Let’s start by discussing why SEO is important in today’s online universe and how it came about.
History of Search Engine Optimization:
There are many discussions about the origins of SEO and linking but to make things simple, we are going to only discuss SEO in relation to our internet overlord, Google, seeing as they for the most part set the standard.
Originally, Google ranked pages highest based on the number of links to that webpage from other sites. Being the “most referenced” link to whatever search term logically meant that it was the most desired result when searching that term, right? Well, not always but for the most part in the infancy of search engines it worked pretty well.
Each link that points to your website provides “link juice” to it, the metric that is used to understand how you rank compared to other sites in terms of linking. As you build up link juice, you become a stronger authority as a highly referenced website or specific page.
Today, SEO works largely by the same practices with a few caveats created to help address different methods for “gaming” the system. For example, not every link has the same weight so a link from a big, reputable source like Forbes is worth more link juice than one from a local mom & pop hardware shop or a small-time personal blog. Wikipedia is essentially the “God” of link juice because it carries so much weight as a highly referenced site.
Life has some shortcuts but in SEO you can’t cheat because you’ll get beat every single time. No amount of spamming content, spinning content or otherwise ‘quick’ solutions exist. When someone approaches you with a “super fast solution” or “quick fix” for small business SEO strategy, it is either going to cost a fortune or they are simply lying. Maybe both…
The truth is, it is going to take time and effort to make it happen but YOU can get started on your own very easily.
Where Do You Begin? Keywords:
Your SEO journey is going to start almost entirely in a game of cat and mouse searching for the keywords or phrases you want to start ranking for first. If you do this successfully, you are going to start ranking higher and bringing more traffic to your site and can then move onto trying to rank for more highly contested keywords and phrases.
During part two, we are going to go into a full discussion of some of my favorite strategies for selecting keywords for your site and what to do once you have selected them.
Check out part 2 here!
