The term “search engine optimization” may get thrown around a lot, but yes, that pesky SEO remains important to the success of your website, and by extension, your business. Digging through pages and pages of search results to find information you need is frustrating and discouraging. If potential clients cannot easily find information about your company at the top of SERPs, they’re less likely to use your product or services. By keeping a few things in mind, however, you can rise to the top in search engine rankings.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the use of keywords and careful website design to bump up a website on the results pages of search engines and thus increase visitors to the site. This means making the text, links, and tags on a webpage easily accessible to the algorithms that “read” webpages and churn out result pages.
How does Google work?
Google’s latest algorithm is meant to understand the meaning behind a question rather than just picking out individual words and locating pages that match those words. If Google search couldn’t see the forest for the trees before, it can now see the forest. This helps searchers get their questions answered more organically, rather than throwing keywords out there and hoping they’ll stick. It doesn’t make keywords less important but makes groups of keywords more important.
What does it mean for your business?
Dos
- Keep your website updated with fresh, quality content.
- Anticipate what people want to know about you, and address those questions on your website. (e.g., on an FAQ page, in blog posts, etc.) Answer the who, what, when, where, and why of your business.
- Organize content in an easy-to-follow order. Pages should navigate intuitively from broad topics to more specific information. For example, your homepage may have a link directing users to an “About Us” page. Users could expect to find more specific information under “About Us” such as “What We Do,” “Our Team” and “Our Mission.” The very same navigation that makes it easier for users to get around your website also helps search engines pick out the most useful nuggets of information for searchers.
- Use concise, descriptive titles and tags.
Don'ts
- Bury text that contains important content in graphics, animations, or drop-down menus.
- Litter your website with repetitive or unnecessary keywords.
- Leave a trail of illegitimate backlinks to your website. Lots of links leading to your website are attractive to search engines, but only if those links are from reputable sources.
- Create page names or descriptions that are the same or similar. This increases the chance of search engines displaying the wrong information to visitors.
- Use complex URLs that don’t convey information about the content on that page.
The importance of building a reputable brand both on and off your website should not be underestimated. Sites that have proven themselves as trustworthy content providers will earn higher spots on SERPs. Always remember that the users of your website are your first priority. Chances are that if you’ve made things easy for users, you’ve made it easy for search engines to find you as well.
If you’re struggling with SEO, we can help. Blue Frog’s professional team of writers and website designers can give your business the push it needs to leap right onto the front page of search results. With offices in Des Moines and Denver, we serve large and small clients across the U.S.
