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Sunday, 2 September 2012

SEO: Just How Does it Work?

By Ralph Burns


To succeed in marketing your own business on the web, it all starts with a unique, effective and "search engine friendly" website. Without having these 3 factors, it will be very difficult for people to find you and your business online.

Of all the three factors though, the most important so that you can improve your business online is to keep your website "search engine friendly" - and that all starts with search engine optimization or "SEO" for short.

New to SEO? Actually, most of us have no idea how major search engines find out which websites rank at the top and which are completely ignored. So if you are not familiar with how it all works, it's not just you!

To put it briefly, search engine optimization or SEO is the art and science of making your website as easy to locate by the search engines as possible. And when you're making it easy for the search engines to find you...then your potential clients find you as well.

SEO is arguably THE most important factor in terms of setting up a profitable and successful online presence because without it, it doesn't matter how great your site or how earth-shatteringly amazing your product or service is, if no one can find you in Google, then its all for nothing.

How Does SEO Actually Work?

Well lets say you're a dentist in San Mateo, California and you wish to grow your business. As a dentist, potential people searching for the services you provide may type in such words as "san francisco dentist" or other such terms into major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

In a perfect world, your site would appear on the 1st place ranking in Google for both of those "keywords" that your potential client has typed in. If your website appears on the first page of the Google search engine, your potential customers will be very likely to find you and know about your dental services:

However if your business website is not listed on the first page of search results, then potential customers are going elsewhere for their dental services. As a result, they'll have a really difficult time finding your site and learning with regards to what you do. The truth of the matter is, the last time YOU did a search on Google for anything, when did you ever go to the second page of search results? If you are like most people, probably very rarely, if at all.

The goal then, is to get your site to the first page of Google. That is where all the traffic and money is because very few people search deeper than page one.

Furthermore, the higher your business website appears on page 1 the better. In addition, it's been shown that for people who are trying to find local business services online, 61% of them make a buying decision on that search!

Now more than ever before, it is very important for businesses to have excellent exposure on the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The major search engines, like Google look at both factors to find out what website they will "serve up" when someone enters a keyword like "san francisco dentist", "toothache", "beanie baby" or "how to lose weight". Each time a person type in any of these keywords into the search box, the search engine (and Google is the best with this right now) combs the internet in a millionth of a second to serve up the webpage or website they deem is most relevant and authoritative for your search. This is how you get to the top of the search engine results.

When you put together "relevance" with "authority", you have a magical formula for success with having your website and your individual webpages to the first page of Google and the other search engines.




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