But how does it work?

You can have a great Web site. It can have exciting graphics, informative copy and wonderful videos, but all of this means very little if you’re unable to drive traffic to your site.

As a business, your primary objectives should always be to drive traffic, keep your audience informed and engaged, and ultimately increase conversions. All of this means that you need to improve your Web site’s online visibility. With many companies vying for your attention, it’s easy for a site to get lost on the Web. But, with a little bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work, you can work towards increasing the amount of traffic to your Web site. Let’s get started.

We’ve all heard the term Search Engine Optimization in relation to Internet marketing and Web site design, but without a little bit of background knowledge, this process may be confusing.

We’ll start by defining SEO and how it applies to your Web site. SEO is the ongoing process of improving the factors that influence your site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Notice, that I use the term “ongoing.” Search engines use a very complex algorithm to rank Web sites based upon a series of constantly changing factors. This is why it’s important to utilize a Web Analytics tool in order to track user interaction and engagement. Monitoring user interaction at intervals enables you to learn what content is most popular and which content might need a little bit of tweaking.

Metaphorically speaking, search engines use crawlers or spiders to scan through Web site copy and files and to catalog these files into one large index. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the search engine will then search through its index and produce results that best match the query. Algorithms differ between search engines, which is why it’s important that your site be indexed and ranked well on all of the search engines.

While we don’t know all of the components to the search engine’s algorithm, here are a few tips to help you get started:

1.) When you’re in the planning stages of laying out your site map and page content, you want to make sure you’ve defined the goal(s) for your site.

In terms of each page, you want to research the relevant keywords/keyword strings that will be incorporated into the back-end of the site in the meta title, description, and keyword tags and you want to create informative and engaging copy that the user sees that is built around these keywords.

When selecting the content that will be displayed on each page, think of it this way: each item that is placed on a page presents you with an opportunity to reach out to your audience and establish yourself as an informational resource.

2.) Web site architecture along with server performance is also an important part of SEO. Poor navigation and design as well as slow site speed may count against how well your site is ranked. Because search engines have been designed to enhance user experience, they mimic users in the sense they don’t want to wait for a page to load or have to “crawl” through pages of disorganized content to find what they’re looking for. Put yourself in the user’s shoes: if you have to wait a while for a page to load or if you can’t find what you’re looking for you’re going to visit another site, right?

3.) Lastly, one of the most ignored components of SEO is link building. Link building is the process of creating in-bound and outbound links that link to and from your site to other Web sites. Linking out to other reputable and information rich sites establishes connections, provides users with additional resources, and ultimately helps to establish your site as an informational resource.

I could talk about SEO at much more length, but I realize this is my blog article, not my dissertation. Want to learn more? Give me a call at PUNCH!