Attracting new visitors to your website is critical for most businesses and organizations and this article is the first step in helping you understand why SEO is important. Whether you treat your website like a billboard which is put up and forgotten, or you put extra effort into making it relevant, up-to-date, and engaging your website needs to be seen to be read. If you have an unusual situation where the only people using your website do not use a search engine to find it, then you can ignore the rest of this article. If, however, people do use a search engine to find your website, then SEO is extremely important.
Why are search engines important?
| 70% of people use search engines to find websites |
70% of people use search engines to find relevant websites. Without a search engine bringing those visitors, your business or organization is virtually invisible on the Internet. Search engines are like roadways that bring the traffic past your front door. If you build your website without a SEO strategy, it is like building in the middle of a forest with no roads. It will exist but no one will know it is there.
Who is most important to a search engine?
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It is not the website owners! |
The search engine's most important customers are the people searching for a website and not the website owners. Their ultimate goal is to provide customers with the most relevant information possible. If your site is deemed to be strongly relevant to a person's search, then your website will be high on that search list. If your website is not as relevant, then it is buried way down the list. Relevant information is the key. You cannot ignore this fact although many websites do.
How do search engines find relevant information?
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Many websites mistakenly hide content |
They use software robots called spiders which are programmed to roam the Internet and index (download and categorize) the content on every website they find. There are two factors required for this process to happen. First, search engines need to be able to see your website's content. The content on many websites is mistakenly hidden from these spiders, due to the way they are programmed. Second, they have to analyze the validity of the content and discard useless content that may disappoint their searching customers.
So if a person was searching for a financial advisor in Toronto and there was a website that used the word Toronto, financial, and advisor a hundred times on one page but there was no other valid content, that website would be considered spam and would be ignored. A website which could be at the top of the search engine list may only have those three words five times on any given page, but they are also found in proper sentences, titles, downloadable files, etc. Relevant information must therefore be valid.
What is the secret to attracting the search engines?
| Seeing the tree despite the surrounding forest |
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the secret, but it is really not a mystery. Although the search engine companies will not divulge the specific methods it uses to rank websites, they do offer lots of information regarding basic principles of SEO that are proven to work. When you first build a website it is virtually hidden among a forest of websites. When you incorporate SEO strategies, the search engines will soon build a road to your front door. If you continue to use effective SEO strategies, it is like having a Goodyear blimp hovering above your website shining spotlights onto it. This whole process may take several months but it is worth it.
What is important to the search engines?
When a search engine finds relevant valid content on your website it classifies this content into keywords. Some words such as
'the',
'as', and
'like' are largely discarded as are photos because it cannot read words inside a photo. The remaining text is considered keywords which are then given a weighting (quality value) based on how it is used on the website. More weight is given to words that are also found in titles, bullets, links, page headers, file names, etc. When someone goes to a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask and types in their search words, the search engines go through their vast indexes to find websites containing those key words. The list of websites containing these keywords (often in the hundreds of thousands) are then sorted based on the weighting of how each keyword was used on each website. Websites with a higher weighting value of keywords appear before those with a lower weighting value.
What can the search engines read and not read?
They can read most text unless it is contained in a photo or javascript programming code. Many drop down menus use javascript which can therefore be a major problem for you. The other issue many people do not realize hurts their visibility to the search engines, is when text is actually part of a graphic or photo. An example of this is in the text box below.
How should I use keywords?
| By understanding how your target market uses keywords |
People are discovering that the more keywords they type into the search engines, the more defined their search will be. For example, if they wanted to buy water plants for their pond and type the word water into Google, they would get 549,000,000 websites (as of November 2007). Topics would range from oceans to paddle boats to molecules. People are now much more knowledgeable about search engines and will use more defining keywords such as pond water plants, to shorten this list to 2,080,000 websites. If this doesn't give them the best results they may also add double quotes around these words, so "pond water plants" would shorten their search list even further to 13,300 websites. If your website was created to help you sell water plants for ponds but you rarely used the word pond in your content, you may never be seen by prospective buyers.
Would it help if your business was in Toronto Canada and you added this city name to your webages? 49% of people now include a local city name to find relevant websites. So if they added Toronto to the search criteria "pond water plants" Toronto, this list dwindles down to 10 links. Wow, what an opportunity because there are far more than 10 businesses selling pond water plants in Toronto. Knowing the keywords your target market is using and using the best combination of keywords, will bring that search traffic to your front door.
How can Ultimate Websites help with SEO?
| We build SEO strategies into every website |
We incorporate SEO strategies into every website we design. Ask us about keyword tools that can assist you with finding popular words people are searching for on the Internet that relate to your products or services. By using these keywords in the proper quantity and quality throughout your website, you will increase your chances of the right people finding your website. However, having keywords throughout your website is not the only requirement to draw attention. You must also use them in ways the search engines will find them more valuable. We can show you how. With an Ultimate Website, we make it easy to own a more visible and attractive website for both the search engines and your target market.
