Written by Anitra (DSN Content Contributor)
For today’s digitally connected society, if you have a business, you get a website. Great! Now you and 50-11 others have a website. How do people wade through all of the Internet noise and find yours? SEO. And what exactly is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is a focused, series of steps website owners take to improve the chances that customers, potential customers and search engines find their web page. SEO is not pay-per-click advertising, it is not social media marketing, it is not content marketing. But SEO is used to boost the effectiveness of all of these efforts. If you don’t mind your web page coming up on page 194, then SEO is not necessary. But if you want your web page to be indexed by search engines, and found below paid search ads, maps and local listings, then you’ll need to incorporate SEO best practices to compete.
Does Your Business Need Match Making?
When people use a search engine to look for information, services and products, a search engine will return pages of a website it believes are relevant to the person’s search query. This list of results is called “organic search results.” It is called “organic” because these pages, theoretically, are popular because people like them versus the paid results and search engine chosen results. I liken SEO to match-making – your website is in search of a sponsor, patron or client – and SEO is the behind the scenes primping that will present your website in the most attractive way to gain popularity with search engines and people.
SEO in SERP
Getting Found By Search Engines
Once you publish a website, you may be online, but that doesn’t mean that search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go have found your web pages. Even if they do find 1 page of your website, it doesn’t mean that it’ll find all of your pages or even bookmark any of them. Optimizing your website for search engines involves taking actions that increases the probability that search engines will file (index) all the pages of your website and return them in search results and also that when people visit your page, they like what they experience. SEO can be broken down to two fundamental undertakings: Technical Accessibility and Meaningful Content.
Learning The Basics
In the next part of this series, “What Is SEO?” we’ll look at some of the technical measures that SEO specialists take to help ensure that your website finds its match! In the meantime, head on over to Moz for a great tutorial on SEO basics. And if you have any specific questions, let me know in the comments or visit my website and drop me a line.
How much should a business owner spend on SEO and how can you tell if it is really effective.
It’s hard to quote the cost a business owner would need to spend on SEO for almost the same reasons it’s hard to quantify ROI for SEO – SEO is about building relationships with people who are interested in the products, services or identity of the business. The amount of work involved to increase search engine rank and user engagement will drive costs. I would suggest a 1 or 2 person sized business set aside at least 20 hours and maybe $50 a month for online marketing and advertising, if they plan to do the work themselves. If they want 3rd party assistance, they should definitely increase that amount to a few hundred dollars per month because a SEO professional may charge based on time spent or he/she may charge a flat rate per project. SEO takes time to see results, and thus, time to gauge effectiveness. There are ways to measure progress, but you should start to see a change in search engine results page (SERP) rank and website activity which you can measure in Google or Bing analytics. Just keep in mind that SEO is a long-term investment of conscious effort to craft your business’s public online identity and that should be worth the investment. You can contact me directly if you want a review or your website. Please visit my website http://www.composedmedia.com/ for more information.