The Basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

44% - That is the number of people that start their online shopping experience by using a search engine. The question is - How do you get the search engines to show your website when someone is looking for what you have?

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of improving your website so that it attracts more visitors from search engines.

The problem for small businesses when it comes to optimizing their website for the search engines is that there is just too much information to wade through and much of it is so technical that most people don't understand it. This leaves them afraid and not knowing what to do.

Today I am going to provide you with some basic knowledge about how people are finding you on the web and the role search engines play in that

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

To understand SEO, let's think about how people find information today. Let's say someone moves into an old house and needs to replace all the electrical outlets themselves.

What would they do to figure this out on their own?

Odds are they're probably going to go online and enter their question into a search engine. And they will be specific in that search. They may type in "how to install a 3-prong electrical outlet?"

Google Searches

Google gets over 3 billion searches every day from people who have questions and problems that they're looking to solve.

Here Come the Spiders

So, search engines need to find the most relevant, useful, and trustworthy answers. In order to find those answers ,they send what are known as "spiders" to crawl through the web searching for that content.

Those spiders try to figure out what each web page is about. From that data, they create a list of results that are relevant and useful to searches. Then they rank those results based on the popularity and authority of those websites.

This ranking is what you see when you look at a search engine results page.

The first few results and the ones listed on the side are ads. Websites that have paid to show up at the top but below that, you are looking at the top 1-10 unpaid or organic results that contain the most popular relevant answers.

As business owners, your goal is to be listed in the top organic results. Because let's be honest, most searchers only click on the first few results they see. In fact, 60% of all organic clicks go the organic top 3 results.

So, how do you get up in the Rankings?

That's where SEO comes in. You need to figure out what your prospects are searching for so that you can make sure that they find your website.

There are many factors that search engines take into account when crawling your pages and trying to understand them.

The Importance of Keywords

The top factor and the number one element to focus on is your use of keywords. Keywords are the words typed into search engines. Basically, they're the topics that searchers are trying to learn more about.

Like "How to install a 3-prong electrical outlet" would be an example of a keyword

In order to attract those strangers to your content, you need to do research to figure out which keywords relate to your business and your industry. Here is an article on Using Keywords to Increase Website Traffic that you may find useful and another article 5 Modern Keyword Research Methods to Uncover Hidden Gems on how to actually do the research itself.