SEO Explained

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, it is best website practice to get higher internet search rankings.

SEO provides search engines with key words which describe your business. That will result in your website coming up in searches by your target audience. In due time, this ideally causes first page listings on internet searches. This hopefully results in greater traffic to your website. And so, increase sales potential.

If your website has no keywords or key phrases, search engines have nothing to match up. Therefore, potential customers will not find you in searches. Instead, they will see your competitor’s listing.

For example, compare the following two sentences.  “My business is the best in the area”. Vs  “My Beauty Salon is the best in Bentleigh“. Regarding the first sentence, it has no desired key words in it. The second sentence mentions “beauty salon” and “Bentleigh”. These are specific key words or phrases relevant to a location based business. With this in mind, a search engine like Google matches the request to what it has on file.

Many thousand of results are displayed. What determines first listing? There are several factors.

A workflow that works

Firstly, place your key words in the visible content. This includes headlines. But not too many keywords. That is known as “keyword stuffing”. As a result, the page is penalised and therefore ranks lower.

Next, each page element should be carefully tagged for SEO. A common element is a photo. Name photos with keywords. There are several other tags that you can only do from the “back end”.  For instance, “Alt text” which is not visible to the visitor.

Finally, to speed the process up, submit a sitemap to Google. A sitemap shows exactly where each page on your website is. Google saves this information to load your page faster.

Organic SEO vs Paid (Pay Per Click)

The results described above require no ongoing costs. That’s organic. Google will change how it ranks websites frequently. So you will do frequent maintenance to keep up.

Pay per click gets faster results with less effort. Consequently, some find this appealing.