What is SEO 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has recently become quite the buzz word and it's important you understand what it is and what it is not. Essentially, at it's most basic, it means making your website easy for search engines to index and rank. This means that your website needs to be coded in such a way that the search engine "spiders" (little programs which scour the text of your website) can follow links to all the pages of your site. And once they get there, that they will find readable content. Then the search engine will put your website in their index, to be found when people search for certain keywords that match your site content. It's pretty basic, right?

 

Search Engine Indexing 

If your site is not optimized, the chances are, it will not be found when people do searches for your content, because the spiders can't find the information that exists on your page. But such an occurance is really rare. You would have to try pretty hard to make your site unindexable. It could happen if your page was entirely built in Flash (which is more like an image and can't be indexed by spiders), or the links were not accessible to the spiders (because they are in flash or something else which blocks spiders) so that the search engines couldn't find all the pages on your site. But for the most part, a decently designed site, is going to be found by search engines and will end up in their index. Being in their index isn't enough, though, if the site is ranked very low. Because when the search engine returns the results for a keyword search, and your site doesn't show up in the first few pages of the results, then probably people will not find your site.

 

Goal of SEO 

So the real goal of SEO is to help your site get ranked higher in the search engines. A noble goal, and there are some helpful things you can do to increase your ranking, which we'll discuss below. But unfortunately since everyone wants the coveted first page ranking, there are a lot of scams out there whereby people try to outwit the search engines and falsely improve their site rankings. But companies like google are very smart and they are always improving their ranking algorythms to keep the results pure. And if they find out that you have used questionable means, your site rankings will actually be lowered. So beware of companies that make great promises about increasing your rankings. Find out what they propose to do, and make sure that it's not going to harm your rankings, or at best cost you money without tangible results. 

 

It's really quite simple: add interesting and helpful content that is rich with keywords which your potential visitors may search for.

Common SEO Suggestions 

A lot of SEO companies make a big deal about Meta tags for keywords and description. These are real easy things to add to a site. It's a good idea to add keywords and descriptions to all your pages, because it can help categorize your site and it conforms to good organization standards. But the truth is, most search engines don't pay any attention to these tags, because they are too easy to abuse. People would put all sorts of keywords into their meta tags in an effort to make their page higher ranked, but the page had nothing to do with these keywords. Thus search engines, as a rule, ignore this.

SEO companies will also claim that you need a sitemap. All our sites have sitemaps, but still it's important to realize that sitemaps are only useful if pages on your site are not accessible by your links. But assuming your page is indexable, sitemaps will not increase your rankings.

 

SEO companies will also sometimes attempt to get other sites to link to your site. This is a proven method of increasing your rankings because it makes your site appear popular, and increases the traffic to your site. However, if the page linking to your site is known to be a link spamming site, then the search engines will punish you for trying to deceive them. Likewise if the SEO company spams your address on a bunch of blog comments, it's just bad PR for you and you don't want that. So if you have friends or associates that want to share links, then by all means refer one another. But don't try to falsify your site's popularity.

 

Another area of your site that can be customized, is to use h1 and h2 tags, and the like, to indicate heading titles. This makes the content in those headings seem more important, and search engines are said to give some preference to this sort of content. However, at the end of the day, it's not going to affect your rankings very much.

 

So What Can I Do?

So what can you do to increase your site's rankings? It's really quite simple: add interesting and helpful content that is rich with keywords which your potential visitors may search for. In essence, you are providing content that is interesting to your constituency. It's so simple it's elegant. If your site is helpful to people, they'll come. And if they come, your rankings will increase. So you should seek to develop useful functionality, inovative ideas, and regularly updated articles and content that make your site a desirable destination.

 

Our recommendation is to avoid SEO companies that promise unrealistic results with nebulous methods which can't be verified. Your best bet is to take that money and hire someone to write some good articles for your site. And keep your website updated with new information and blogs. Make it a place where people want to come regularly. 

 

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