Can your customers find you?
Do you get the traffic you want from your website?
What good does it do to invest in a beautiful website that nobody ever sees? Most searchers never go beyond the first page of search engine results, so, if you’re not there, they’ll never find you. SEO encompasses everything you can do to help your website show up higher in search results — so you can be found by the people searching for what you have to offer.
So, how do you get on the 1st page of Google?
This isn’t something that can be done overnight, rather it’s an on-going process that ideally starts before your site is even built. There are three main steps to get you the customers you’re looking for:
Keyword Research
Optimizing your website is about making sure your site comes up when people search for specific terms related to what you do. But what exactly do your customers search for? Do you know? You may have some ideas, but good keyword research can tell you exactly. Chances are, you’ll be surprised by some of the results. We can help with your keyword research, or you can take a look at some free SEO tools to try it out yourself.
On-Page SEO
Once you know what keyword phrases you want to optimize for, it’s time to get those phrases on your site. While there are various critical places on your page to include your keywords, just stuffing them in there won’t quite do the trick. You want to offer unique, valuable content that centers around your key concepts.
If your site isn’t built yet, you’ve got a bit of an advantage here. You can make sure your site structure reflects your key phrases, your urls contain your keywords, and your site is built within a system that easily allows for page by page search engine optimization.
This piece usually doesn’t take long unless you have a large site, but it is best done initially by a professional who understands and can access each key place in your content and code to include your keyword phrases. When you work with Satin Web Solutions, we’ll also train you to incorporate solid SEO in any new pages you create.
Many people stop here and wonder why they don’t get much traffic. To really see results from your efforts, the next step is critical.
Off-Page SEO
Not all SEO happens on your website. The links that point to your website from other websites are just as important. Google has gotten increasingly savvy about evaluating these inbound links, or backlinks, but there was a time when a Google search for the phrase, “click here,” led to Adobe Acrobat Reader! Their ranking came from thousands of links throughout the internet with the anchor text, “click here,” linking to the Adobe download page.
The links coming into your site play a critical role in your search engine performance. In the 1990’s, Google revolutionized search not just by serving up results that contained related keywords, but by creating a system to evaluate a website’s quality. Anytime somebody linked to your site, it was considered a “vote” for your web page. The more people “voting” for you, the better the content you must be providing. This was the foundation of the Google PageRank system, which is still used today.
While Google’s algorithms continually become more complex to avoid search spam and manipulation, to better understand user intent, and to adapt to new technologies, the core is still based around the original voting system. People noticed they got better results searching on Google and huge numbers abandoned the other search engines. Google has been so successful that they now dominate the search industry with 92% market share worldwide.
Creating links to your site is an on-going process. It is one of the more difficult parts of SEO to do on your own. Often, the most important role of a search engine optimization company is the link-building services they provide. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about our SEO services.