As a website builder it never ceases to amaze me the number of people who think about search engine optimization way after the fact that they have spent a lot of time and money building great websites for their companies. Most of the time it isn’t until we pose the question about their search engine plans that they even think of this. Of those who do ask us if search engine optimization should be carried out, we have to say that this task is imperative, if they want their websites to act as real marketing tools and to bring them prospective customers. Out of all the hits to the websites out there, around 90% of those originate from the various search engines, and 70% of all search engine searches are carried out on Google. This article will help to explain why you, as a website owner, need to optimize your site, and also how to get those all important high rankings.
The basic principles you need to know about getting positive SEO results are that you need to rank on the first page of the search engine results pages for the keywords that are being searched by a lot of people each month. There is no point in ranking number 1 on page 1 if the keyword it ranks highly for is one that is never or rarely searched. The reason I say you need to be on the first page is because most people don’t click past the first page when carrying out searches on the Internet. Instead the go back and revise the search term before searching again.
Although I would highly recommend you aiming to get a page 1 ranking on Google for your targeted keywords, you shouldn’t forget about Yahoo, Bing, AOL and other search engines. Having page 1 rankings on these will also help to drive traffic back to your website. Linking back to your site from social networking sites, blogs, forums and directories will not only help to drive traffic, but those incoming links to your site will indirectly help your search engine rankings.
So how important is optimizing your website? In reality you could simply ignore the optimization of your site and the visibility it brings from the search engines, but at that point what is the point of having a website? If you are going to rely on handing out your business card which contains your website URL for others to see, then you may as well simply just hand out brochures to these same people since they are the only ones who will get to see what you have to offer anyway. That will save them the time it takes to go to your website after they have your business card in hand. It would pretty much be like dressing up in your best suit or dress and sitting at home, hoping and waiting for someone to drop by to see how good you look. However, if you dress up and then invite others to come and visit you then you are more likely to have success. Think of search engine optimization as being your invite to others to drop by to your website.
One of the first things you need to know, before spending money and time building a website, is how you are going to get others to come and visit the site, and how will make sure those that do drop by are potential customers, rather than casual browsers. Even if your budget doesn’t stretch to having a professional carry out your optimization there are many websites and books that discuss the subject and if you invest some time researching the subject you should be able to do a decent job yourself on your site. This is the very least you should do if you want to seek any advantage over your competition. If they optimize their website and you also carry out that task then at least you are competing with them. However if they are optimizing and you are not, then you can be sure that you are simply handing over the vast majority of prospective customers to them without at least putting up a fight.