So you have your website up showcasing your business off, but now what?

Nowadays, not only is having a website a must but for your business, but having a good search engine ranking, especially above your competition, is a much needed item.

This is where Search Engine Optimization or SEO comes into play. SEO is the process in which search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, decide the relevancy of a website in comparison with what a user searches. Search engines have millions of pages to choose from and optimization is one way to get your website to be recognized first. The higher ranking a website is, the higher up it shows up on search engines’ results. Users are much more likely to visit websites on the first page of Google, than sites that show up on the 2nd or 3rd pages. In essence, having good SEO helps your website get more traffic.

Getting to know how search engines work is the first step in improving your over-all SEO. Search engines are text-driven, so they search the World Wide Web looking for text that describes what the site is about. This is known as crawling. The more relevant your text or “keywords” are, the more likely your page is to be recognized by search engines for a given topic or subject. Things like images and videos (unless it’s Youtube, but we’ll talk more about this later) are not “crawled” by search engines, so having relevant text that correlates to what your website is about is a must, and it is important that the key things you want your website to show up for are text-based, not image or flash based.

After a website or webpage has been crawled, search engines move on to “indexing” the page. Indexing is a way that search engines decide the what keywords and phrases to assign to a certain web page, so that page shows up when users search for those keywords.

So what can you do to optimize your website and get better results on search engines, and in turn bring in more traffic?

First off, as you can imagine, keywords are very important process of giving your page a high ranking. Words matter, especially word order. You will want to define your keywords and be as specific as possible in doing so. If you are a website design company, you will want to make sure you have keywords that people search for in Google relating to website design. One good way to do this is to find out what exactly users search for when they are looking for a website design company. There are tons of websites out there that you can use to see what exactly users type in (although these sites are not always free). Once seeing what users search for in a given topic it is time to decide what keywords to use. Generally, you want to use something that has lots of searches with as little competition as possible.

Competition in search engine ranking, is how many websites are being indexed for a certain keyword(s). If you’re a website design company, chances are there are tons of searches for website design company but tons of websites being indexed for the words “website design company”. While this might not be a bad thing to use as a keyword, because after all, it is the primary factor of your business, lots of other people are using those keywords to be indexed, so getting a high ranking off of those keywords will be hard to do.

However, a keyword like “top website design” or "website development business" might be highly searched for but has a significantly less amount of competition than “website design company.” So you will want to make sure that on your pages you mention the words “top website design” or "website development business" in that exact order so that you will be indexed for that by search engines.

Another important step, that is also keyword related, is titling your web pages correctly and efficiently. Titles are what show up at the top of an internet browser and tell the user what the page is about, but more importantly, help search engines decide what the page is about and help in indexing the page. Titling your web page with the correct keyword(s) is a very vital step in achieving good SEO. Using the “website design company” example, you might not want to give the title of “website design company” to your home page because it has a lot of competition. You will want to give the title something that has lots of searches but little competition, so if “top website design” was a good keyword with little competition you will want to use that instead. It still is relevant to your website and what your website is all about but has less competition which will place it higher up in search engine rankings. Be careful not to go overboard using the same keywords over and over throughout your site because you can get penalized for it.

Links are also an important process in achieving good SEO. The first step you can take in links is linking to other pages on your website. Search engines like Google, love links, and like to see lots of links on your website. On your home page for your website design company it would be a good idea to have a link somewhere in the content that links to say, your “Services” page, even if you already have “Services” in the menu. Try to provide links to different pages throughout your website as this will help the less visited pages get better rankings. However, like keywords, don’t go crazy with links because you can get penalized for those as well if you overdue it.

Not only are links on your own website important but links on other sites linking back to your website are also key to good optimization. Using high ranking pages like Facebook or Twitter to link back to your can greatly help due to the amount of traffic they receive and their high recognition among search engines. If your company has Youtube video, it would be a good idea to embed the video somewhere on your site for two reasons. The first being that Google owns Youtube, so they like when you have their services on your site, and the second being that search engines also take into consideration how long users stay on your site. A video is a good way to keep visitors on your website for a longer period of time.

Adding content to article websites is also a good idea, as this will create link backs. Article sites that have a high ranking, like ezine articles, will provide quality link backs to your website. If you’re a website design company you might want to write an article talking about the basics of website design or interesting ways to create unique layout, ect., being sure to provide links to your website somewhere in the article and post these on article sites. The more links you have back to your website, the better SEO you will have because search engines will see links to your website across the web, not just on your own website.

Submitting to article sites can be a bit tricky and take some time to figure out. Some sites do not allow any links in the body of the article and only allow them in the resource or bio about the author below the article body. Other sites aren’t as strict and let you place them as you please throughout your article, although the amount of links allowed is often limited. So be sure to do some research on what the article site allows as far as links go, so you don’t waste your time submitting articles only to have them rejected.

Search engines also like websites with a good reputation. The more your page is visited, the more relevant, fresh content, and quality links your site has, the better off it is. Having a something like a blog or news feed is a good idea, because this will allow you to constantly provide new content on your website and will give your users something to read and let you know that your company hasn’t disappeared of the face of the earth as well as keep users on your website for longer periods of time.

Check out this great video explaining SEO.
 
Having good Search Engine Optimization can be a tricky process and takes some time to learn the ropes and get the best results. 10 Pound Gorilla has a great team of search engine optimization specialists and that have years of experience and know what it takes to have better optimization than your competitors.

We start from the ground up, doing keywords research and researching your competitors, to find the best keywords strategies, and are able to help you get link backs as well as sign you up for article submission and directory listings.