To succeed in marketing your own business online, all this begins with an appealing, effective and “search engine friendly” website. Without any these three elements, it’ll be extremely hard for everyone to find you and your business online.
Of all the three factors though, the most important so that you can improve your business online is to keep your website “search engine friendly” – and that all starts with search engine optimization or “SEO” for short.
New to SEO? Actually, most of us have no idea how major search engines find out which websites rank at the top and which are completely ignored. So if you are not familiar with how it all works, it’s not just you!
Simply speaking, search engine optimization or SEO is the art and science of getting your website as easy to find by the search engines as possible. So when you’re making it easier for the search engines to find you…then your potential customers can find you as well.
SEO is arguably THE most important factor in terms of setting up a profitable and successful online presence because without it, it doesn’t matter how great your site or how earth-shatteringly amazing your product or service is, if no one can find you in Google, then its all for nothing.
Just How Does SEO Actually Work?
Well let’s say you’re a dentist in San Mateo, California and you want to grow your business. As a dentist, potential clients trying to find your services may type in such terms as “san francisco dentist” or other such terms into search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
In an ideal world, your site would appear on the first place ranking in Google for both of those “keywords” that your potential customer has typed in. If your website pops up on the first page of the Google search engine, your potential clients will be very likely to find you and know about your dental services:
However if your business website is not listed on the first page of search results, then potential customers are going elsewhere for their dental services. As a result, they’ll have a really difficult time finding your site and learning with regards to what you do. The truth of the matter is, the last time YOU did a search on Google for anything, when did you ever go to the second page of search results? If you are like most people, probably very rarely, if at all.
The aim then, is to get your website on the first page of Google. That’s where all the traffic and money is simply because very few people search deeper than page one.
Also the higher your business website shows up on page 1 the better. In addition, it’s been shown that for people who are searching for local business services online, 61% of them make a buying decision on that search!
Now more than ever, it’s vitally important for businesses to have excellent publicity on the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
The search engines, including Google look at both factors to determine which website they will “serve up” when someone enters a keyword like “san francisco dentist”, “toothache”, “beanie baby” or “how to lose weight”. Each time a person type in these keywords to the search box, the search engine (and Google is the best at this right now) combs the web in a millionth of a second to serve up the webpage or website they consider is most relevant and authoritative for your search. This is how you get to the top of the search engine rankings.
When you put together “relevance” with “authority”, you have a magical formula for success with having your website and your individual webpages to the first page of Google and the other search engines.
To get information on local search organic serach engine optimization, check out our website where you can get more information on search engine optimization techniques as well.