Search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing the online visibility of a website or web page in one or more web search engines. SEO aims to improve the content’s visibility in unpaid search engine results.

Why is SEO important?

When an internet user use an online search engine to search for something, you want your web content to appear as high up in the results as possible. That’s because online users are more likely to click through to top ranking web content. When was the last time you visited the #7 ranked result? Or made the effort to click yourself on to the second page of search results to see if any interesting content might be hidden away back there?

If you want a lot of traffic to your website, you need to rank well for relevant searches, and this is where an expert in Search Engine Optimization can help you.

A key factor to take into consideration here is what type of traffic you want. Are you happy with any traffic, e.g. because you get paid for every display of a banner on your page? Or do you want the type of visitors that are likely to convert into paying clients? If you are selling mail-order dog food from your website, ranking well for searches such as “dog food” and “buy dog food online” is more important than just attracting a lot of random visits.

Optimization

A skilled expert in SEO will work with many different aspects of your online presence to promote your content’s visibility in search engine results. The best results are typically yielded by a multi-prong approach where various adjustments and improvements aid each other to promote a better overall result. This involves both changes that will be made to your website and work that will be carried out elsewhere, e.g. making other websites link to your page to make it seem more relevant in the eyes of the search engines.

Examples of SEO work:

• Identifying relevant search terms
• Identifying relevant search terms for which there is only low or medium strong competition
• Adding content that help make your page more relevant for the elected search terms
• Identifying and removing issues with your website that lower its value in the eyes of the search engines, e.g. broken links, slow-loading items and content that cannot be properly seen and indexed by the search engine
• Adjusting the coding to make it more search engine friendly
• Identifying the site’s current profile when it comes to inbound links from other sites, and working to improve this profile to make it more suitable for the client’s needs
• Ensuring that the site works well with the major browsers
• Ensuring that the site is suitable for both traditional browsers and mobile device browsers

Find a SEO firm

This article was last updated on: December 12, 2017