Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing your search engine visibility by improving your onsite and offsite content to be cleaner, unique, and keyword-enriched. The more visibility your web pages receive, the higher the chance of your organization being seen by prospective and current customers. Our experts from different SEO companies in South Jersey helped give a brief introduction to SEO and what it is all about.
When Did The Concept of SEO Begin?
The concept of SEO began in 1997 as search engines began popping up on the internet. These early, new forms of search engines were primarily directory driven and competed with each other on providing the best websites around the web as per their editors. These search engine sites started developing different algorithms and characteristics to look for when ranking sites at a particular spot. As expected, sites that did not cooperate with the algorithm were ranked lower than the ones that did. Thus, the practice of SEO was born. Search engines change their algorithm immensely over the years and still update routinely. The practice of SEO is determining how your website can best fit this algorithm to drive your page rank up. As the popularity of digital advertising and purchasing has increased significantly since 1997, the value of SEO has also increased.
How Does SEO Work?
Major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use automated bots that regularly crawl web pages around the internet. These bots collect information about each page and place them in an index. Once in the index, the proprietary algorithms of each search engine determine what pages get ranked at what spots for a given search query. The algorithms take into account hundreds of different factors that can be updated or altered at any time to little extents or huge extents. Each search engine query or keyword phrase has its own set of pages that are ranked in a certain order for when the given keyword phrase is searched. Keywords are extremely important because these are the words that searchers or potential customers are using to find products or services. Depending on what your organization does, certain keywords are extremely important to rank high for.
How Do You Practice SEO For Your Organization?
If you are looking into SEO and not sure about the process, let us start it off for you. The first thing you want to look into is keyword research. Determine whether you want to go after local, regional, or national keywords. The bigger the area, the more search volume that is available. For example, if you want to rank for “marketing agencies”, it is going to have a lot more volume than “marketing agencies in NJ”. That doesn’t mean just go after the keywords with the most volume. You want to find keywords that are relevant to your organization that have good volume in relation to the difficulty of ranking high. National keywords are a lot harder to rank for than local keywords. Once keywords are determined, you begin editing your onsite and offsite content by adding keywords into your content that link back to web pages on your site. Examples of content could be press releases, blog posts, blog comments, meta-information, and much more. Aside from keyword research and link building, user experience is immensely important as well. Cleaning up your code and making your website clean and concise are extremely important for SEO purposes. In some cases, you may want to consider a full redesign. This is just the surface of how to practice SEO within your organization, small or large.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding SEO, reach out to our team at Accularis Marketing Solutions at 1-856-793-9440!