Are you being searched for?

90% of Internet surfers use search engines such as Google and Yahoo to find products and services. On average, these search engines average 300-500 million searches a day. Only 7% of websites are properly optimized for maximum search engine visibility. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about improving your website so that search engines will rank it higher. Proper SEO takes time and is about improving your website for your visitors and the search engines. There is no way to guarantee any ranking for any period of time. There are ways, however, to make your website more useful to visitors and easier for search engines to browse through and rank.

As your website begins to rank higher on the search engines, more visitors are brought to your website. Good SEO is part of a comprehensive and well thought out plan. Not only do you make your website look better in the eyes of the search engines, your visitors are presented with content that is useful to them. The SEO efforts, if done right, will not only bring in more visitors but it will also bring in higher quality visitors. When high quality visitors are presented with useful content, conversion rates are bound to improve. In that sense, SEO is not about shady tricks and deceptive practices, but more about improving your business in a less conventional way.

A few of the things you might do as part of your SEO program:

• Write high quality, relevant, and unique content that is useful to your visitors.
• Obey webmaster guidelines, such as the one posted by Google.
• Validate your website code so it is error free.
• Run your content through a spelling and grammar checker.

What you do NOT want to do as part of your SEO program:

• Try to trick the search engines so you rank well but offer little value to visitors.
• Copy content from other websites.
• Fill your website with content that is not useful or relevant.
• Join a link farm where you pay to have lots of other websites link to your website.

Sometimes it can seem tempting to do whatever you can to get higher rankings, no matter how deceitful the technique is. Whenever this thought enters your mind, remember this: when was the last time a search engine purchased something from you? The answer is absolutely NEVER. Your website will never be a success if you don’t think about your visitors first. What good are all those visitors if they never buy anything? Make your website more useful to your visitors and make it search engine friendly at the same time. Y our rankings, online business presence, and overall success will improve over time if you stick to this formula. If you have any questions or are looking ways for your website to appear strong and with legitimacy under SEO, please contact us today!