The online business world is a dog-eat-dog kind of environment. You need to know what you're doing and be armed with the tools you need to put yourself above your other competitors. You can do this by optimizing your site in such a way that it will get higher rankings in the search engine results page where it can easily be found by your potential customers – before they find your competitors.
That's where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes in. It's a term used by internet marketers to optimize a site so that it becomes friendly with the ranking algorithms of the search engines. By optimizing your site to the search engines you better its chances of being indexed and being ranked high.
Why you need to do SEO.
This is because when people look at the search engine results page many, if not all, simply stop at the first page. In fact with the way things are set up right now they might just stop at the first five or six entries – which is the number of entries you will see on your screen when the results are loaded.
Can you imagine if your site is in the 5th page or even in the 20th? The chances of you getting found by your potential customers lower and lower the farther you are from the 1st page. That's why it is very important that you strive to make sure that you get as close to the first page as possible – in this business being number one means everything.
Benefits of using SEO
When you use SEO, the largest benefit you get is exposure. As mentioned above, the higher your site ranks in a given search the higher the chances it will be found. If you get found you get the traffic of potential customers going to your site. They come to you because they see you and know where you are. It's like hungry people driving down I-95 in Florida seeing a big billboards for a BBQ ribs joint with directions on how to get there.
Because the advertisements can be seen, those who love BBQ and those who are just hungry in general will make a bee-line that place – the result: more customers for the restaurant. That's what SEO can do for your site. Even if just 10% of that traffic buys from you, that's still a lot of conversions if you are able to get 1,000 visits a day.
What's SEO Again?
As mentioned earlier SEO is a methodology to make your site rank high in the search engine results page. You need to work hard in order to make things work for you. It means changing things in your site as well as doing research on what keywords to use that's popular and is searched. You may need to also redo your content and inject the right keyword phrases. There are rules you need to follow so that your content will not be considered as SEO spamming.
Getting back links is also important. You can do this by either submitting articles to article directories with a link back your site. You can also collaborate with similar sites and post reciprocating back links to your relative sites. You can get tips and strategies online – YouTube is your best source. You can also pay companies to do SEO for you but if you're just starting out that may not be the best option from a financial standpoint. You can do SEO on your own and many have done that to varying levels of success.
SEO can help you have a successful site. Used properly it can give you the exposure, traffic and sales you need to be on top.
